Chi-town

Whew! I am finally caught up on all of our summer trips!!! Now, my first official post about our new life in Chicago...

First off, we love it here. Our apartment is working out great...I love how spacious it is and the fact that we have so much storage and multiple families in our ward and/or going to business school who live in our same building. I love the neighborhood of Hyde Park...so much is in walking distance that we are only using our car every three days or so. We are trying to live it up outside at the park, 57th street beach (along this main road right by our place-- Lake Shore Drive-- there are all of these "beaches" they have made on Lake Michigan...pretty cool to be at a beach with buildings in the background!)






downtown (we even got to host two of our favorite friends from DC-- Kim (who now lives in Denver) and Ashlee on their visit to Chicago!)
The famous silver Bean in Millenium Park

These crazy fountains that projected faces on them also in M Park


Kim posing with downtown in the background-- beautiful ksums!

It was really fun to have them here-- I got to catch up on some girl time (i.e. talking a lot to girls!)


White Sox game (with one of Brandon's future classmates (and former classmates from BYU))


while the weather is nice. We have already met some really great people and I've been trying to take more of the initiative to make plans rather than just waiting for people to invite us. I feel like I need to do that now so that when it is winter, and it's that much harder to get together, I will already have established some nice friendships. (Can you tell that I'm nervous about the months and months of cold that are looming ahead???) But, as for now, the weather has been great, the people are oh-so friendly, and we are really liking our new home.

It was so nice to be here for a few weeks before Brandon started orientation (started two weeks ago) and classes (he starts this Thursday!). As already mentioned, it took a little more work than normal to get moved in and make our apartment more baby/human friendly :) The biggest thing was getting some rugs and big cut carpets to lay over the cafeteria style linoleum tile that is in every room, and it took a good week or more to really feel moved in. I will take some pics soon of the new place, but for now imagine an old apartment, with lots of windows, on the third floor of a mid-rise building (so at tree level), and other apartment buildings/rowhouses surrounding us.

Brandon is really excited about school. He is all registered for his classes and has now completed his pre-school retreat as part of the Booth Lead program as well as most of orientation. We've joked that they are slowly easing the students in before the storm really hits! I am both excited and nervous for classes to start-- I loved my grad school experience and can't wait for Brandon to be able to immerse himself in the academic topics he loves, but I have been forewarned that he will be very busy. So, even more reason to keep reaching out and making new friends :)