Postcards from Chicago

 

First, to show you what angelic travellers our children are, here's Mabel on the metro to the airport, listening to some music.

Here she is doing some colouring in her new colouring book (five crayons at a time) while we wait at our gate.

Here are Dash and his father making some paper aeroplanes to pass the time. (Who thought a book of paper aeroplanes were a good idea? More to the point, why do I keep typing "airplanes"? How long have I been in this country anyway?)

Chicago! This gorgeous thing is called Cloud Gate, but known locally as The Bean. For obvious reasons.

 

I took a lot of photos of it. This was close to the middle, underneath, looking up.

At this point Mabel had shed her shoes and socks, of course. That day saw the end of the warm weather, but she spent the rest of the trip refusing to wear a coat and trying to take her shoes off again anyway.

Dash admiring the view from the 96th floor of the John Hancock building. That's Lakeshore Drive, looking north.

On a bus to the Museum of Science and Industry. This photo is much more representative of our trip than any of the others, but you need to add a soundtrack of exasperated parents telling them to leave each other alone and sit quietly and fine do you want to watch another episode of Word Girl on the iPod?

 Dash down a coalmine, because the museum is just that cool.

On the L (the El?), plotting our route to support the runner on the morning of the marathon. Well, no, actually I just gave them the maps to entertain themselves and they were mostly just figuring out how to fold them back up again. (Then I had to tell them how being able to fold a map up properly is a very important disappearing art, like reading a map, for that matter.)

Also, please note that Mabel is sporting tights-as-leggings here, because she refused to put on anything further. I hid her under a blanket in the stroller and when she finally got out, I managed to coax a pair of trousers onto her.

But by then, she was barefoot again. Sigh.