Time for a little bit of catch-up! Almost three weeks ago, Kevin went to Hawaii for a week-long conference. Fun, right?
Unfortunately, this meant that Joseph and I were home alone without him. That was not so fun.
Actually, it wasn't too bad. There were parts that were hard -- playing piano at a baptism with Joseph on my lap, and then being too distracted getting my own food to notice how many cookies he had grabbed during the brunch -- but most of it was still pretty fun. We kept ourselves busy with lots of watercolors, bike rides, playgrounds, etc., and Joseph seemed to understand he needed to take it easy for my sake.
And then, on Tuesday, we rode the train to Chicago! After a frazzled morning in which both my phone and charger stopped working and the printer didn't work, we finally made it to the train station!
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| We both felt so grown up. |
I realized after the whole trip was done that we did this without any electronic devices. Kevin had my laptop, so we pretty much entertained ourselves with old-fashioned books, toys, and food. It's lucky I didn't have that realization before or during the trip, because otherwise I might have chickened out.
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| We told lots of stories about the meerkat, most of which mirrored Joseph's life pretty well or modeled behavior (such as sitting instead of climbing around) that Joseph was eager to copy. (As a side note, I guess he heard me say the meerkat had "scary eyes" because he says that now about the meerkat and most every other small animal. Ha.) |
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| After I took that last picture, he wanted a turn with the camera. (I guess I lied -- a camera is an electronic device so we had one after all.) He insisted on pointing it at himself and taking a series of selfies. |
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| One time I helped him point it at me . . . |
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| But most pictures ended up like this. |
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| Hey, look! Another electronic device. Daddy was calling from Hawaii to encourage him to not climb around. They had a good 15 minute chat. |
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| "Trees. Water. Buildings. Monster trucks." There was a lot to tell Daddy about. (Every truck was a monster truck, and when he turned himself into a blanket monster, that also became a monster truck.) |
Finally, after tons of delays (getting stuck behind a freight train chugging along at 10 mph for who knows how long and then hanging out in Hammond, Indiana while we waited for a train to pass us), and reminding Joseph that we couldn't "get in the water" after every single puddle we saw, we made it to Chicago! With Joseph perched on my hip and my backpack on my back, we navigated our way through the dark, empty streets between the train station and the Blue Line, talking and singing loudly as we went to make it less lonesome. Joseph insisted that every stop on the subway was ours, and finally, two stops before the last one, he was right! We had made it!
Since
Kaylie already blogged about what we did once we were there, I'll redirect you there for the remainder of the adventure. Except, here are a few more funny pictures.
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| Good to get into personal grooming habits early in life. |
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| Joseph was kind enough to take a picture of us. And he even pointed it the right direction. |
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| I think this sculpture exists so people can take pictures. |
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| And I'm not sure why this sculpture exists. It was fun when it started spitting water from the LED people's mouths. |
After a few fun days, we took the Megabus back to Ann Arbor (tragically missing two ward 4th of the July pancake breakfasts), went to a 4th of July potluck empty handed a half hour later (we were posing as entitled Americans, I guess), saw enough fireworks to last Joseph a lifetime (3 minutes of spinning flowers in the church parking lot), and came home. And then it was Saturday, and Kevin was coming home "from English," as Joseph said. We survived sharing the freeway with cars overeager to get to a baseball game or something and then picked up Kevin!
And then the world was perfect again! At least for a few days.
