Is That the Sea?

Another fabulous day, this time in actual Chicago. Here my son stands near Shedd Aquarium, by Lake Michigan, showing off the cool skyline. (We don't have skyscrapers in Iowa, with the exception of a couple puny ones in Des Moines...can you count grain elevators?) His shirt says, "I make dirt look good," with a John Deere logo. As if his total fascination and lack of experience with seagulls wouldn't give us away as Iowa people. I spend a lot of time in Des Moines, which is a fairly large metropolitan area...yet when I tell people from Chicago that I am from Iowa, they look at you like you a total country bumpkin. I feel like saying, "Well, we don't use'ly wear shoes, but we thought as we was goin' to the big city, we'd get us some of those new-fangled tennis shoes..." Lol. And they totally don't realize you are joking.

We got to walk along the lakefront for quite a while, and did not actually visit the Shedd Aquarium (they had a 2.5 hour wait), but we walked around the outside and my son played in a cool childrens' garden. We spent most of the day at the Field Museum.

We visited the pirate exhibit, which featured artifacts from an actual pirate ship, found at the bottom of the sea. My son loved the murals and the life-size replicas of rooms on the ship.


His favorite was the Underground Adventure exhibit, in which you pretend you are less than an inch high, and you going through an underground tunnel, where you encounter comparatively large worms, bugs, and invertebrates. Here is breaking out of his cicada shell.

You gardeners will know this one, only much bigger and more frightening. I think they are gross when I am normal size...earwigs. Except in this exhibit it was 8 feet long and snapped its tail pincers at us when we got close to its eggs. We actually learned a lot about soil preservation, and went through a really cool Egypt exhibit. My son learned about Egyptian ancient history and can explain in detail the part about weighing your heart, to see if it weighs more or less than a feather, and then the monster Ammit eats you if you are a bad person.

Here is a shot of 'Sue', the tyrannosaurus, as we were leaving, no, correct me, we were being rudely shoved out the door while we tried to take one last picture. Even though nobody tried to make us leave the GIFT SHOP after hours.

What a good baby! He was an absolute doll through several hours in the museum. Tomorrow is a visit to a local arboreteum, and possibly an indoor water park in the afternoon. Also in the mix, a visit to a Trader Joe's. Another store I have never been to...I'm sure it will be an experience.