Elias' Birthday

Saturday was Elias' birthday.  It started as all birthdays should, with a ginormous silly straw and some super sugary cereal (Count Chocula)!

He must have slept good; look how puffy those eyes are (and how happy that kid is; he woke up super duper happy)!

And guess how old he is.  4? You guessed it!

Opening a present.

He was pretty excited about that Star Wars LEGO.

 Laying it out with Daddy.

Daddy making sure that Asher doesn't jump right in there and start helping.

This boy is actually really good at following the directions and putting together LEGO.  He is definitely the best of our kids at this age.

 His audience whilst assembling.

For his birthday dinner, he requested tacos (actually he requested cake.  Then, after I explained that we would have cake after dinner, he requested "toties".  It was only after I explained that cake and cookies were both desserts and that I was looking for a dinner food that he settled on tacos).  For his cake, I made pumpkin spice cupcakes with cookie butter buttercream from this website.  So yummy.

All lit up.

 Enjoying licking the frosting off the candles.

We had some guests for dinner to help celebrate.  Per Elias' request, we invited Colin and Mary. "Tolin" is definitely one of Elias' favorite people in the world right now.

Asher couldn't have the cupcakes because of egg but he could have the frosting so I made him a pumpkin cookie sandwich with the absolutely awesome cookie butter buttercream.

Colin and Mary even gave Elias gifts.  Colin's may have involved a shampoo bottled filled with nickels and dimes.  They also gave some pretty exciting Hot Wheel car set ups.  One involves a ramp for the tub (which has already been deemed a hit).

All in all, it was a pretty great day for all.

Wrapping up Chicago: Part 3

Group pic.  

I started this post well over a week ago; let's see if I can finally get it done.

As we were packing up, we decided to escape the mess in a truly epic way.  We made our own drive-in movie.  We thought the LEGO movie would be a good subject for all the awesomeness.

Here's the sideview, for some perspective.

Fully immersed in the LEGOocity.

In preparing to pack up all we own, we had to dig out all the boxes we'd been saving.

It was a bit precarious to get them all out.  You wont' be surprised to note that we had more than enough boxes for all of our things; although, depressingly, not way more.

Our friend, Julie, introduced the kids to some different artistic mediums.  Addilyn was drawing a cherry with charcoal.

Elias was experimenting with paint.

Asher experimented with paint as well.  And look, there's Julie.  Thank, Julie, for letting the kids play and explore with you!

In our last week, we had to go to one more Cubs game.

Elias was pretty entranced.

Me and my girl.

Our view(well, specifically Elias').

Albert was pretty active throughout.  He certainly kept us entertained during the slow parts.

And look, they won!

Group pic.  And fun was had by all!

Wrapping Up Chicago: Part 2

The next park we went to was Indian Boundary.  It has this great wooden playground that is HUGE.  They were having some parks district program(s) there.  That meant there were a lot of kids, most of them older, already playing on the playground.  It made it less than fun for Albert and even Elias and Asher. So we pretty quickly abandoned the playground and wandered over to the wildlife pond.

Three brothers checking it out.

They found turtles!! Everyone was pretty enraptured by the turtles.   Even Albert was so into that he put up quite a fuss when we went to leave.

Cheesy pose.

"You want to give me a bite of that peach."

Addilyn's friend, Maizy, came with us.  Here she was offering Addilyn some words of encouragement.

And then a helping hand.

 Ornery face.

Cutie faces!!

The girls seemed to really enjoy helping Albert sit with them.

Some perspective.

Albert really enjoyed sitting in that tree with the girls too.  As soon as I got him down, he wanted to go right back up.

"Swinging" in a tree.

Wrapping up Chicago: Part 1

I'm not sure how many posts it will take to wrap up our time in Chicago and get us caught up to present day.   It will take a few at least.  Here we go!

We did a tour of all our favorite Chicago playgrounds in our last couple of weeks there.  We started with Gompers.

So fun.

We brought a Addilyn's friend, Lily, along with us.  

This slide is the best.  They've come up with so many different way to enjoy this slide.

So cute.

Bouncy, seesaw.

Kiss.

Swing.

They were playing a game where they would pretend to be asleep.

Then one would kiss the other to wake him up.  It was weird.  But also hilarious!

Cute girls.