Christmas in Chicago, Part 3

Man, it always takes me forever to get a blog post up!

After playing out in the snow, later that evening we all bundled up again to go out to dinner.

April and Blake

Before we went on our trip, I had read a Chicago-area mom's coupon blog (if you're a couponer and not following her blog, you really need to check it out!!) about a cute little restaurant 25 minutes away from my parents' house so I emailed my family saying I really wanted to try it. Two days after we arrived, a Saturday night, we ventured out in the snow to have dinner there.


It was every little boy's (and grown man's!) dream!

Trains, trains and more trains! There were tracks going around the room by the ceiling and a train circled round and round.

the menu

But best of all, there are two long u-shaped counters where you sit. In front of you are more tracks and a little train delivers your food to you!


The "train engineer" took our orders...

and filled our drinks...

It was really cute!

And every time an order was ready, the engineer would pump the horn to announce the train's arrival. (It was really loud, especially since we were sitting right by it, and it honestly got a little bit annoying since we had to hear it many times.)








Here is the train disappearing into the kitchen.


They actually did line up the baskets correctly and the train stopped in front of us with our food perfectly matched up. The food was decent, and really, we were there for the atmosphere so it didn't matter if the food wasn't fantastic. The kids thought it was great, and so did the guys. :)

We let the kids ride a little train.


Blake was fascinated by everything going on around him.

Sam and Danielle

The boys loved looking at all of the displays around the diner.

We're glad we got to go and experience it! One of my favorite things was how the waitresses are pretty much trapped inside the u-shaped counter so you get a lot of attention and service; drinks were refilled quickly and there was time to chat a little with them. If you needed anything, they were right there to help you. One of my huge pet peeves is going out to eat and never being able to flag down your server to get a drink refill or extra napkins!

*My apologies to the random strangers we got pictures of. I hope you never find my blog. Haha! I'm pretty sure everyone there thought we were absolutely crazy because we took so many pictures. We got some weird looks. Er, it could also have been because my parents are deaf and we were signing. Who knows! Our waitress looked at us a little funny as we were taking picture after picture so I tried to explain that we were from California and there visiting family. I think that cleared it up. Crazy Californians. ;)*

A couple of nights later, we were invited to my sister April's house for dinner. I loved the soft glow of the Christmas lights under the snow.


My boys usually complain when there are nothing but baby toys laying around at someone's house, but thankfully they were perfectly content to play with cousin Blake's toys!



The day before Christmas Eve, my parents and Danielle went with us to a local children's museum.
We have a membership to our small local museum and native animal zoo and it allows us to get into affiliated museums around the world for a discount or even free! We were able to go to this children's science museum for free and it even allowed my parents to get in free too!

There was a big air drum you could experiment with. You'd hit the drum with your fist and then a few seconds later, a person sitting in a chair several feet away would get hit with a blast of air.

There was all sorts of science-y stuff to look at. (Can you tell that is not my favorite thing?)



My dad was more interested in his phone, haha.
We got to watch a little demonstration where a little girl from the audience (a small group of kids sitting on the floor) was chosen to have electricity run through her and make her hair stand up on end. Here the boys are watching her.
I took pictures of her but I didn't get a great one and it makes me feel funny to post pictures of people (especially kids) I don't know.

There was an interesting Ancient Egyptians exhibit.
There were various displays of "then" and "now" items to compare life from back then to today. The one that I found most interesting was this:

a fertility goddess

I thought it was kind of weird to have that in a children's museum, but maybe that's just me.

The boys got to explore and touch all sorts of things. Raymond was really interested in the exhibits and seemed to get further and further behind us while I was ready to hurry up and move on.


Nathan playing an Egyptian game. If I remember correctly, it was kind of like Sorry.








Not a lot of commentary because I was bored and none of the things I "learned" have stuck. HAHAHAHA! Museums are never really my thing. My poor hubby. He'd spend all day there and I'm ready to leave after an hour or two.

My favorite part was the bubble wall. Every good children's museum has one of these!







Those things ROCK! (Nathan is standing here as I type this saying, "I look blind!" Ha ha!)

to be continued eventually, when I feel like it