The girls at IKEA

Fall break in Chicago again. The school quarter is over, Beth did the parent-teacher conferences without me this year to simplify things (they just have all the teachers in the gym at once and you pick who to talk to) and we got good reports for all 3 of the kids, and all 3 kids made the honor roll, yay! So to celebrate (kind of) we went to Chicago. I took Thursday and Friday off, and late Thursday morning we drove to the city, and spent a good part of the afternoon at IKEA. Most of the time we were there, Alex was off playing Pokemon Go, and the girls were off goofing around and taking funny pictures of themselves. Which we didn't mind as long as they weren't disruptive. So I hope they weren't too bad.   For an IKEA visit, we got off easy, spent less than $100. We checked in to the hotel, then went to Medieval Times for dinner (Natalie had never been, which was a shame). Third time for me, now. Same show as the first two times, but still fun. Friday we went into the city and hit the Art Institute. The girls once again were off taking funny pictures of themselves for most of the time, at least after lunch. Alex, I believe, was bored out of his mind the whole time. Missy was pretty bored too, when they weren't doing the pictures. But I think Natalie really liked being there. Saturday morning, we drove back to the city and went to Lincoln Park Zoo, which is free which is good, but if you can't find parking at the zoo, that can get expensive. But the zoo was nice, even if the habitats seemed small. Again Alex was off by himself playing Pokemon Go for a good chunk of the time. We finally headed from the zoo to Willis tower, since the wait was so long last time it scared us off. I thought it would be fun to take the El from the zoo to the tower, which it was, except the El station nearest the zoo was much farther than I thought it was, and we walked for quite a long way before getting there. The ride was fun enough, though. But the wait was even longer than we thought because we had thought the advance tickets we bought online would allow us to skip the lines, which it did not. Well, we did get to skip the line to buy tickets but no others, so it was about 90 minutes instead of 2 hours to get from the entrance to the top. But everyone was happy to finally get there. After we were done with the tower, Beth (with her torn meniscus, we think) was done walking, so just Natalie and I rode the El and went back to the zoo to get the van, then came back to pick everyone else up. On the El ride back, though, everyone in the city was already on board headed to Wrigley Field for a Cubs playoff game (which they won, earning the right to go the the World Series) so the train was as crowded as I have ever seen. But we made it, and drove back to the Tower (although we went through the Wacker Drive tunnel for quite a ways, where there is no GPS signal, so I had to guess where to exit and did so poorly). We picked them up and headed home.
Oh and by the way, we had ALL of the carpets and couches in the whole house cleaned last week, hoping that it helps control the fleas. They said they only saw any activity in one place on the couch. Things have been better with the fleas, but we can't get them all off Ruby. Iris has been fine,