. VG .: Garfield Park Conservatory

One of the nice things about being on summer break is that we can take day trips during the middle of the week! Don't have to wait for the weekend when things are going to be extra crowded :) This day trip was down to Chicago. A friend invited us over for hot pot (which I'll write about later) but it was later in the evening. Normally, we wouldn't travel so far for dinner but this is a fun type of dinner and we hadn't seen them in awhile... so we figured we could hit up something fun in Chicago during the day and then go there for dinner.

Dude super excited to go to the 'jungle'

We ended up at this place called Garfield Park Conservatory. It is basically an indoor jungle, desert, or any other type of climate you could think of. It was really cool. When we first walked in I didn't think that we would be there that long but this place was enormous. They had the jungle, with all the different plants and trees (it was pretty much the best botany field trip you could go on), the desert, lots of outdoors gardens, a palm tree room, a kids play area, and many many other things. The kids LOVED it. I wasn't sure that it would entertain them for as long as it did but it was great!

Now, I thought that this was hilarious, but it was kind of at the expensive of Tristan... In one of the outdoor gardens there was a labyrinth that was getting watered so there was this huge sprinkler in the middle of it. It was a pretty warm day out (90's) and I thought that the kids would like to cool down. Tristan really liked the idea of the labyrinth but he was trying to avoid getting wet. The sprinkler was going in a clockwise motion and he wasn't paying attention so he got sprayed and to get away from it he kept running a little bit ahead of the sprinkler, which ultimately just got him more and more wet. By this time he was pretty unhappy, but it was a bit comical to watch from the outside... We got him into some dry clothes and he was a happy camper after that. Lucy on the other hand LOVED the water. She would just stand and wait for it to get her, and then once it did she kinda looked around like, "what just happened?" and then giggle.

One of the things that Duder kept wanting to go back and see where the big carp. They had a pond of them with Chihuly glass work and he was fascinated. He started naming fish... 'one, two, three..' haha. It was pretty good.