for the family day long weekend, we drove down to chicago to visit ken's aunt and uncle. ken took a couple extra days off from work and we headed down on thursday morning with naters and doug. we were concerned about how nathan would be on the 12 hour ride down, but, for the most part, he was pretty good. the drive itself only takes about 10 hours, but since we had to stop multiple times so that nathan wouldn't go stir crazy in the car, it ended up taking us 12 hours on the way there and 13 hours on the way back due to some bad weather.
one of our stops was at this mall in ann arbor, mi. we wanted to stop somewhere so that nathan could stretch his legs and run around for a bit. luckily, there was a large children's play area in the mall. nathan headed straight for the ice cream truck and stayed there for a good while.
on our trip, we discovered that naters *loooooooooves* blueberries. he must've eaten more than 50 blueberries each day of our vacation. aunt ivy and uncle david even went out and bought more since nathan had eaten all of them after the first couple of days.
this trip turned out to be a big family vacation. andrea was the one who organized the whole thing and it ended up that all of the older cousins were able to go. so in total, eight of us descended upon the lee household. ken's aunt and uncle were so gracious to host us all at the same time. and apparently, this is what family vacationing in the 21st century looks like ... everyone had some sort of lap top, ipad, ipod, iphone, blackberry combination and there were definitely periods at home where everyone was in their own world. but don't get me wrong, we did converse too. we also played some games (settlers, bananagrams, cards), which was fun since ken and i almost never get to play games anymore. we also had quite the number of laughs looking at old family photos and watching old family movies. i was saying to mike that it's a good thing we don't have to air our embarrassing moments from childhood for everyone to see. :o)
also seems like we did a whole lot of eating on this trip. after everyone had arrived on friday night, andrea's request was to have chicago deep dish pizza. we went to a restaurant nearby called lou's and shared three medium pizzas between the nine of us. ken and i are more thin-crust pizza lovers, but it was still good to try the chicago specialty. the crust was too thick and greasy for my liking.
on sunday, we went to aunt ivy and uncle david's home church, willow creek. we planned on taking nathan down to their sunday school area wanting to check out how it works. we registered him and were assigned a unique code. all kids have to wear a sticker with their name and code on it on their front and back. also, since it was his first time there, he had to wear a "I'm 2!" sticker as well. as you can see from the photo, he was all stickered up. surprisingly, we made it almost all the way to the end of the sermon before i noticed nathan's code up on the screen. but since willow creek is so enormous, it took a few minutes to get down to the children's area, even with me running the whole way. i was just so surprised that he even stayed down there to begin with since we can't even leave him at sunday school at our own church (where he goes every sunday) without crying.
other than the blueberries, nathan hadn't been eating all that well on the trip. on our last night, we went to an italian restaurant and he more than made up for his lack of eating by devouring the mac & cheese kids meal we ordered for him. he even fed himself (...and without making too much of a mess)!
these photos were all courtesy of the camera on my iphone. i haven't had time to upload and process the actual ones from my camera so those will have to come later.
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