Sunday, April 10, 2011

Chicago: Annie's Take

Remember back in February, when we took the girls to Chicago for the weekend?  Things we did in a 48-hour period include:


  • taking the train, the el, and cabs
  • going to the Lincoln Park Zoo
  • ice-skating at Millennium Park
  • going out to eat multiple times
  • swimming in the pool and the hot tub
  • shopping
  • tea at American Girl Cafe
  • bath bombs in the hotel tub
  • seeing the play "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus"
We returned late on a Sunday afternoon.  On Monday morning, Annie went to school and, as she does every Monday morning, she wrote in her journal about her weekend.

When I went to Annie's conference a couple weeks ago, her writing journal was out for my perusal.  I paged through almost a year's worth of Monday morning writings, noticing with equal parts horror and amusement that it seemed no matter what kinds of fun we had packed into any given weekend (and we do tend to pack a lot in, most of the time) Annie almost always wrote something like, "My sister and I watched a movie in our sleeping bags and ate popcorn for dinner."  Which is true, as far as it goes, except that she never said, "We also made banana bread and drove to hike the dunes and rode bikes and played at the park with friends and went to the art museum."  So that's great.  Her teacher thinks we let our kids watch unlimited television and eat junk all weekend.  Whatever.

ANYWAY.  I get to the entry Annie wrote on the day after she returned from our jam-packed Chicago weekend.  Here's what she wrote:


To recap:  We did one thousand fun and exhausting things, and Annie wrote extensively about how Jemma screamed in her sleep (which was apparently "very boring") and then threw in one sentence about what I bought her at the American Girl store.  And then she drew this picture:


Chicago!  Where you'll lie in a hotel bed with a squiggly frown on your face all weekend long!

Then, a few weeks later, Jason and I went back to Chicago without the girls for a single night.  When we returned, we found this note on my pillow:

So . . . I guess she wants to go back anyway.

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