Gorky got a sidekick

Sissy came to watch over the girls this year (quite a big challenge), and the hijinks only increased.

Now that Thanksgiving is over ... it is time to put up the tree!

While we had a great one, I still consider Thanksgiving just a hurdle I have to get over before I can start to celebrate my favorite holiday ... Christmas!  So as soon as the Thanksgiving festivities were over, I sent Joe to pick out a tree and we started decorating.  Joe got a really nice tree this year and it turned out beautifully.  The kids were very excited to help, and only one nice ornament bit the dust.  We'll call that a success.  

Thanksgiving with the Frosts

Mike, Vicki, Gillian and Iris joined us in Chicago for Thanksgiving this year.  We had a great time and managed to pack in a ton of activities in only 2.5 days.  Vicki and I kicked off Thanksgiving with a 5 mile run in freezing temperatures along the lake shore path.  Yes, we are bad asses.  

Then we came home and cooked for six straight hours.  But we made quite the feast, if I do say so myself.

Friday we headed to the Field Museum to walk off some of the yummy pie we consumed the night before.

We took a quick respite to watch Max's state championship football game on the internet (so close!) before walking to the movie theater to see Frozen (which was amazing!).  Saturday we took a trip to the Water Tower to hit up the Lego and American Girl Doll stores before the Frosts headed back to Ohio.  A great time was had by all, and we can't wait until we host Thanksgiving again.

Robot City

There is a cool new robot store in Chicago, run by, of course, robot dorks.  And they put on hour long classes for kids or adults, where you can pick out and build your own simple robot.  I decided this sounded like something that would be right up Finn and his good friend Carson's alley.  They ended up building a cool drawing robot that vibrated 3 different color markers across paper to make a picture.  The kids thought it was AWESOME.