my family is in the shadows i’m the tiny little person in the reflection in middle of the bean taking a picture stop the presses, i’m blogging. i KNOW. seriously i look at how much i’m blogging this year vs how much i was blogging in summers past…and well, the numbers don’t lie, for some reason i’ve not been blogging and yet, we’ve been busy. not busy doing projects every minute, just busy being us. and while i used to blog about us being us…for some reason, i get nervous to do it.

why? well lets just say this: when you live in a small town in a remote area, all the people pretty much knew you knew your stories, and pretty much were family. i could write about everything we went through and they would laugh/cry with me…but they already knew it because they witnessed it or i had already told them. so when i wrote things the people that would come up to me and say “you’re so hilarious!” or “oh my gosh could you BE any funnier?” (cue in chandler emphasis) or my favorite “we can take care of that goat problem of your yours.” and of course “can i just tell you, i love your kid, he’s going to be okay.”

yeah. somehow living in a small town where i was just writing to a computer screen and all my “friend-family” were the only ones coming up to me and saying that they read what i wrote, it seemed okay.

now cue in living in a larger city, (not that large compared to most but still) and not knowing everyone in your town, and cue in the looking over your shoulder and wondering are you reading what i wrote? 

is this weird? i mean my readership has been in the general area in numbers for a few years (a slow incline but nothing too drastic), but all of a sudden because i don’t have my hula hoop of wilderness around me, i feel like i’m more on display.

so yeah. thoughts? 

anywho. i’m working on writing about every day mundane things, because honestly, that’s when the best things happen, at least when you are in a family. it’s the stolen looks between the husband and i of a funny inside joke the kids don’t even know anything about. or the HILARIOUS, or the things that our children do and say that drive you insane or teach you life lessons. 

those are the best memories, and the prettiest images around you that should be the threads of our creativity and the wind in our sails.

so here it is: 

we went on a little trip.

 i say little because chicago isn’t that far away from where we live. well, compared to where we used to live. it’s a mere 4 hours away and we decided we were going to try to see somethings we’ve never had gotten the opportunity to do before due to living on the other side of the united states all our lives.

 we went to cloud gate or “the bean” we’ve seen it in pictures, i’d seen it in movies, but never had i ever seen it in real life.

amazing.

it.

is.

 i tried to get good posed pictures of the kids (emphasis on the tried and you will see why later on in the next few pictures) but due to too many witnesses, i couldn’t do my “take a picture and make it look good so i can use this picture to send it out to everyone this year blah de de BLAH iCAN STAND HERE ALL DAY PEOPLE TILL WE GET IT RIGHT…DON’T YOU TEST ME I CAN CALL SANTA, YEAH YOU HEARD ME!” routine i normally do when i try to get a staged all facing the same way smiling only once a year happening because we’re using it for christmas pictures that year rant.

don’t know what they were contemplating here in this picture…but it would have been cool if all four of them did the same thing, but of course one of them didn’t. oh well.

i have to say the millennium park is pretty cool, we didn’t look at everything, we were kind of pressed for time, but next time we will return and i’ll take pictures (ahem possibly with a camera other than my phone camera because i forgot the real camera)

also this time around we got to go to the Shedd aquarium.

my kids are huge water/fish/turtles/dolphins/penguin/otter lovers, so this was a fun and exciting thing for them seeing that it’s been over 5 years now that we lived in monterey and had the membership to the best after school time waster also known as going to the aquarium for a few hours so mommy didn’t go cray cray till dad got home.

our kids loved the jelly fish, when we were living in monterey, and they loved it this time around too.

in the jelly fish area it was super pretty, with all the jelly fish flowing movements, and they had nice soothing music and the colors were cool. 🙂 kind of felt like a “happy place” of some sort.

here’s another attempt of me taking a posed picture…no go on the christmas card yet again.

 next we headed to the lego and american girl store. i wish i could have gotten the reaction of the girl noisemaker’s face when we turned the corner and saw the american girl store.

she was so excited it was really fun to see.

she got a hand me down doll, she’s been introduced to these dolls just recently, and well up till i went into the store i didn’t get what was so cool.

i was like “a hospital? and hair salon? whaaaaat? thats just stupid.” and honestly it is, but man, you walk into that store and all of a sudden you want to set up a hair appointment for your little doll, eat at the restaurant…with your little doll, and buy matching outfits…wait, no, still don’t want to do that. because that is just too creepy weird and kind of stupid in my book. but yes, buy the little doll outfits and glasses, and shoes, and all the other stuff that you can buy but wait i have to eat next month so let just slow it down for a minute…

regroup. breathe. get out of the spinning of crazy…and make some rational choices

so this time around we got “calissa” a new outfit (i think the girl noisemaker  named her calista, but her “t’s” aren’t all that great. :))

a freaking $38 outfit. um. yeah. (but they came with cute little roller-skates!) anywho moving on.

while the girl and i were contemplating what outfit, the boys were building legos.

legos are the go to toy for my boys. they like them, i like that they like them, and the big husband boy likes them too. we dig legos.

um apparently noisemaker #3 was all over the map on emotions. :/ 

after a fun filled few days we came home. 

and we were super happy to see our new normal of the iowa fields and corn. we are getting used to our new surroundings, and it’s exciting to see what memories we make here.

we’ll talk soon. 🙂