So Long Chicago!

My brother and his family are moving back to California! This is big news in my family. I never really forgave him for packing up my most adorable niece (it was only Rapunzel at the time) and moving so far away from me in the first place. But work was good and the schools were even better and everybody should get to experience snow at least once or twice in their life time. So I learned to live with the distance.

Now, however, work is not good for my brother. He’s had it up to here with the whole mechanic business and frankly he and his wife miss being around family so they are moving back!!! They’re putting their house up for sale in a month or so and hope to move back to Hemet by August. Wowie Zowie! Can you believe it? As if I didn’t have enough excitement going on this summer.

So while I was there, I thought I better soak up as much midwestern country as I possibly could because who knows when I’ll ever have an excuse to go to Illinois again. It’s not really on my list of top five places I’d like to visit.

One thing my brother will miss when he moves back is being able to burn trash in his back yard. He torched a whole dresser and then we roasted marshmallows in the toxic fumes. Just kidding. It was just plywood, no fumes. But seriously it was neat to be able to just burn any old thing you want. That’ll never happen in Southern California. (In my best Beevis Voice:) Fire! Fire!

The next day was a perfect spring day, so Rapunzel and I took a bike ride to Pottawatomie Park or as we call it, Potty Water Park. It is so beautiful out there. Everything is so green. I’ve never been on a more pleasant bike ride in my life. Most of our ride was on wooded trails and a lot of it right along the Fox River. The only deterrents were the occasional dropping spider (Three of them dropped on me from the trees above! But they were very small and I flicked them off.) and my niece having to stop and walk her bike whenever we came to a hill that was waaaay to scary to ride down with training wheels. She was a little dramatic about the whole thing.

In other news, my brother told me that he intends to kidnap my child once it is born and feed it candy all day and then make sure it’s all wound up before he returns him or her to me just in time for bed. I guess he’s planning his revenge.