It started on Friday night, when I scooped up Nico and gave him the choice of what he wanted to do: head down to Lincoln Park to see what we could see or hang out at the house (we were trying to give Dave some time to keep working). Nico chose to hangout at the house, so we headed to the grocery for some supplies. We had big plans to make popcorn and drink hot chocolate and watch Christmas shows. We watched the show, but somehow managed to skip the hot chocolate and popcorn. Weird.
Saturday, Nico and I finished up a huge batch of sugar cookies (to take to my friend Amy's police station at O'Hare). Then Dave and I took Nico up to Lincolnwood Town Center- which is a mall. Dave and I took turns getting massages while Nico road the train and played the skill game (where you use the claw to try to grab a prize from a machine). Afterwards, we headed back down to the city and drove to the end of the Brown line (at Kimball) where the Santa train was. For like the last 15 years or so, the CTA has decorated 4-5 cars in a holiday motif. It spends several days riding one section of the CTA... so Friday and Saturday, it was traveling on the Brown and Orange lines. So we hopped on board.
Nico is doing this super annoying thing lately where he won't look at the camera. Here it looks like he is snuggling me. Not so.
So my plan was to ride the Brown line down to Montrose to get some candy at Margies for Christmas. I know someone who likes chocolate covered cherries, and Margies makes them pretty good, so I figured that would be an easy trip. Since I hadn't specifically mentioned to Dave about wanting to do the train thing, I wasn't planning for him to come along- so I when he said he wanted to, I thought we should go further. So we rode down to the Loop to check out the Christkindlmarket, which was a big mistake. Everyone and their mom was at the Christkindlmarket. Have we talked about how I feel about crowds? And how unprepared we were for the cold? And how when we finally did leave there was a 25-30 min wait at my new favorite restaurant (called the Castle and the Elephant). Yeah, I had a sad.
In any case, we ended up ducking into Marshall Fields/Macy's to use the bathroom and found their candy section. And a restaurant, which was definitely nothing to write home about. After, we headed home to grab cookies and Nico and I were on our way out to O'Hare.
So, one of the things I am trying to do with Nico is to have the holiday be less about buying stuff and getting toys and more about doing stuff. Since he is in a really big police officer phase, I thought we could take some christmas cookies to a police station. And for him, it was totally doing something... he helped me make cookies and rode with me out to O'Hare. My crossfit friend Amy is a police officer at O'Hare, so suggested bringing Nico out and he could sit in a police car and have the sirens and lights on. We got to be in the roll call room for their roll call and inspection. Which was cool. He did get all shy (per usual), so it was kind of a bust in the sense that he didn't talk to any police officers.
Sunday morning, Dave and I finished tearing apart the living room. We've been talking about moving furniture around, but this weekend we had to put up or shut up since we were getting the Christmas tree. Then we made the journey up to Ikea- both of our first times. And we pretty much loved it. There was something for everyone, which was cool. It was snowing, so the trip to Schaumberg took a long time. Then we came back in town and got some groceries and finally swung by Home Depot for a couple of things (including the Christmas tree).
By this time, the snow was really coming down, so when we got home, Dave and Nico shoveled snow while I put the groceries away. It's probably just the novelity of it, but Nico loves shoveling snow. Here is yesterday, before school, shoveling.
No comments:
Post a Comment