We will eat in every day this week in anticipation of my mother and father in-law coming on Thursday, so I'm planning a menu for the week. We are really looking forward to their visit. I'm not one of those people who don't like my in-laws - in fact, I love them! They are an amazing, thoughtful, wonderful couple whose relationship and values Chris and I attempt to emulate every day.
And so they will be our second visitors from Houston. My brother Kevin spent one Sunday with us previously but we really didn't know where to take him or what to do with just one day. This weekend we have a LOT of ideas including going into Chicago and seeing museums or the aquarium and riding the train and taking a boat tour on Lake Michigan. My mother in law wants to see a Great Lake. We have ideas of various restaurants we want to take them to and new experiences we plan to share with them. There is so much that this area has to offer that it's almost impossible to decide what to show them next! The amazing parks, the excellent restaurants, the city, the museums, the putt putt courses, the disc golf courses, the nature centers and forest preserves. It's really rather overwhelming.
Friday, Colin is off of school and will be taking a game design class for free at the public library. They may want to see the Schaumburg Library which is incomparable to any library I've ever seen. Houston's Downtown public library is huge, large collection of books and highly regarded for research, however, for a public library the one in Schaumburg is beyond cool. Their media room is as large as their children's books area and nearly as large as their fiction area. They have a theater where we have attended a lecture on how cinema portrays the aged running through a large selection of movie clips. They have this lecture every first Thursday. They have isles of sheet music and records and video tapes and DVD's to check out. It's fairly incredible. Their children's section has multiple sections grouped and decorated by age group with the chairs and tables gradually growing larger. They are currently building a new teen section of the library and they also have more computer stations than I've ever seen in any library before. In fact, probably more computer stations than some of the larger labs at the University of Houston where I used to work.
Chris and I spent the weekend together fairly alone with the kids both in Houston and we had a fabulous time. We don't yet know anyone else but are perfectly happy to enjoy a thousand new little experiences a day with each other. I'm not sure there would be anyone else with whom I could so thoroughly enjoy a simple drive through a new area remarking on it's quaintness. Every little town and road through the area is so quaint that I've actually sort of recalibrated my quaintness meter.
On Friday night after dropping the kids off at their flight, on a lark we decided to check out downtown Palatine for restaurants and bars. We ran into Octoberfest! Who knew it would be going on in September? We had an absolute blast! So much fun! So much polka! So much bier!
That's all for now. Next time I'll tell you all about Casino Night!
LOVE
No comments:
Post a Comment