G of Donuts stay in Chicago

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With last year's good bye to the bus house, we were delighted to move to the next chapter with the my mom and dad (aka Grandma and Grandpa donut of course); a leisurely stay for three weeks with plenty of time to do nothing but hang out and reconnect.

It had been so long! A year! How was that possible? But mom and dad braved Chicago for an extended stay marked for the kids birthdays. As mentioned, mom and dad showed up a day or so before Alice's just in time to babysit!

Brock's Sunday baseball games were the perfect opportunity to enjoy the sunshine, watch the game, collect pine cones and play in Oz park's wonderful wooden playground.
Lawn chairs and snacks were a staple for the weekend games.
Here we are at Small Cheval, where we see an old donut with a fry and a small fry drinking a shake.
 
As mentioned in Brock's birthday post, we had a great time with puzzles on this visit. AHHH!! Do you see it? the missing piece?! grrrrrrr
Mom and I would often take Alice to Wicker Park after we dropped Brock off at camp. Alice was just getting into the big-girl swings at this point in time.
Alice's birthday, but an example of a typical morning with the GNuts at Grassy Park.
On our last night with mom and dad we took them to our favorite neighborhood Argentinian steak house, Folklore. One of my (our!! Matt worked with him too!) old co-workers from Bistrot Margot, Oscar, has worked there for a while now and he brought joy and memories as  a part of our night out.

Oscar made Alice her first Shirley Temple (for some reason I have always despised the term "kiddie cocktail", it makes me feel like my children are softies. 

But don't let the pictures fool you; life with the Cerneys is as challenging as it is wonderful. We don't have cable, so mom and dad had to navigate streaming networks to watch news programs, and then also had to listen to use bark at that news (we never watch the network news! It was a bit of a shock. Apparently there is this virus called COVID that everyone is dying from). We turned them on to watching disc golf, which was fun for all of us. The Gnuts are hippies at heart, and so they were delighted that long-haired James Conrad won the Worlds this year. And the stairs! There are so many! And the children get up so early! And we are so dang busy all the time. But thank goodness they put up with us because we were so happy to have this time with them. Time to just BE and admire our glorious spawnage and laugh at each other and the chaotic world we call home. As "fading away" as my dad likes to say, becomes less of a theory than a real thing, I cannot say enough how much it meant for us to have them come the long way from Tucson out this way. We love you GNuts!

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