Favourite shot from today:
As you might imagine, we went ice skating down at Millennium Park and it was SO fun.
Auntie Joy came along for the day, helping with kid duty, and just generally being the fun gal that she is! We love her.
And most definitely, the kids do, too!
Maddie and Daddy had fun skating together.
I love seeing them together. Makes me smile. He's an amazing daddy.
Daddy laced up all our skates and got them good and tight - the key to being able to ice skate.
Maddie absolutely loved skating, and by the end of our time she was starting to get the hang of it. I was so proud of her. She fell numerous times, but she'd get back up and try again.
And just today, on the way to school she stated that she wanted to be in the Olympics some day. She wanted to be a gymnest and a figure skater. Sounds EXACTLY like my dream when I was young. I wanted to be Mary Lou Retton AND Dorothy Hammel (sp?).... Didn't work out for me, but I'm okay with that.
The zamboni took FOR.EH.VER. cleaning the ice. So here we are waiting for our turn to cut up the ice.
Dreaming of the triple-sow-cow that I'm not able to land. If only.
And THEN ... on to Chinatown. Oh mercy, did we hit the JACK-POT in the restaurant we chose. I mean, there were like 100 of them to choos efrom and Lao Beijing is the one we landed on.
I have NEVER (and I'm so NOT exaggerating) had better Chinese food and I've had a lot in my day.
Orange chicken. TO.DIE.FOR. Tender pork with garlic sauce (pictured below). WOWZERS. Chicken fried rice. DE-LISH!!!! Honestly, I want to go back right this SECOND it was THAT good.
And after that we wandered around the local shops, happening upon a very local grocery store ... complete with tanks of FROGS and TURTLES. We felt kind of sorry for them, because we're a family that loves frogs and turtles but our experience with said creatures is that the lake, when they're in and out of the clean, fresh water ....
The smells matched the sites.
But we're good with that, because we LOVE local. We LOVE adventure. We LOVE spontaneous. We LOVE Chicago.
Go on out and explore your town/city/village.
