road trip--day 3, millennium park

Our last day in Chicago took us to the Shedd Aquarium where Lewis got to see a whole lot of fish. We had been telling him about it and when we got there, it turned out to be kind of a process to get into the place. We had to take an elevator up to the main entrance, and Lewis was getting very frustrated and kept signing "fish" very adamantly. Once inside, he had fun until he ran out of energy! Due to the low light we didn't get any good pictures. You'll just have to take our word for it!



Anyway, after that we ventured out to find some food which turned out to be somewhat of a saga. We ended up at Qdoba which isn't typical or touristy by any means, but they allowed us to bring our strollers inside so we had a great meal there listening to some great 80's hits over the sound system. Owen seemed to really enjoy the song 'Footloose' and showed us some of his dancing skills while we ate. Check it out here:



After a ton of fun in there, we headed over to Millennium Park to check out the bean and the video fountain. Since beans are among Lewis' most favorite foods, we knew he would like to see a giant bean that is also a huge mirror. He loved it! It was kind of scary because he was running around so fast through the crowd of people there were times we thought we might lose him, but he never got too far away.






Here's a video of Lewis' running around under the bean trying to make new friends.



He was having a great time there! We finally convinced him to walk over to the water with us. This was a picture I grabbed off a website that shows the fountain. There are these huge video screens of peoples faces (one on each end of a huge water drenched area) and they look around for a few minutes and then their lips form a pucker and water starts spewing out like they are spitting. It seemed like a great combination of video and water and we thought Lewis would get a kick out of it, but the screens are so big, he couldn't wrap his mind around it and didn't even 'see' them.


He did enjoy walking around with Beth in the water.


All in all it was a great time. We are grateful for the dual DVD player system that the Wilsons let us borrow! Lewis does great in the car, but Owen struggles and he really benefitted from a whole lot of Signing Time during the long ride. We had a great trip back though. We left Evanston at 7 a.m. and made it back to BG by 4:30 p.m. We had a long stop in Louisville for a break, but otherwise kept things moving. Hope you enjoyed this long summary of our trip! It was a nice break from reality for us.