It is crazy in Chicago on St. Patrick's Day weekend, especially when the weather is a balmy 40 degrees after a week in the 20s. Parking was crazy, pedestrians were everywhere, and my parents (who are visiting this weekend) and I had to dodge several festive groups as we walked, and they wove, down the sidewalk at noon.
It was too cold for us to go downtown to the parade on Saturday, and given the crowd that was out and about in our neighborhood I had no interest in meeting the crowd at the parade. Jett had a writing workshop near home anyway so we dropped him off there and then walked through the neighborhood stores. We had a relaxed, nice day of board games, dinner (corned beef on rye!), and movie night at home. We pumped up the air mattresses and popped popcorn and everything to watch Cool Runnings. It's a good post-Olympics flick.
Today was busier. We watched the boys play soccer and then ate brunch at Wishbone. After that we headed to the art institute to visit
The Thorne Rooms because Jett and I are reading
The Sixty-Eight Rooms, which my mom got Jett for Christmas. Jett and I had a blast looking at all of the rooms that Ruthie and Jack visit in the book. Next time we have to remember to bring the book with us, because we started getting confused about some of the details, and we couldn't remember everything that we wanted to. We also haven't finished the book yet, which would have helped. It was still fun though and I'm looking forward to going back after we finish the book.
We also headed down to the
family space and spent some significant time creating our own still-life. We tweeted the picture of
Kai's still life and
Jett's still life to the art institute and the pictures showed up on a scrolling screen in the room, which was pretty cool. It felt pretty good to be able to touch things and move around freely after spending an hour just looking.
Of course we stopped by the Chicago River to get a picture of it while it is so green.
Finally, tonight before bed the boys constructed some fairly elaborate Leprechaun Traps. We are hoping to catch a leprechaun tonight, or at the very least we are hoping that we find some of his gold. Kai had trouble falling asleep because he is both excited to find gold and freaked out about catching a leprechaun. Jett had trouble falling asleep just because he's so excited. I don't think I will have any trouble falling asleep, but I do hope there is gold in the traps when I wake up!
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