American Girl and The Sound of Music

After Kayley's soccer game and swim lessons on Saturday, she and I drove up to Barrington to stay with one of my best friends from law school, Mel, her husband, Todd, and their precious baby, Sam.  Sam is 9 months old and I haven't seen him since he was 3 weeks old so it was so much fun to visit with them and see Sam.  He is a doll baby!

On Sunday morning, Mel, Kayley and I drove to downtown Chicago to meet up with Angela and Amelia.  Our first order of business was the American Girl store.  Oh my goodness is that store something.  Kayley and Amelia were in heaven.  The store is two levels and there is every doll, bitty baby and accessory you can imagine.  Kayley chose glasses, a braid headband, colored hair pieces and a dog (yep, a dog) for her doll.  Two of those items were on sale so I got out of there with only spending $54 on merchandise.

We had lunch reservations at 11am.  That is quite the experience too.  Kayley and Amelia's dolls ate with us and sat in highchairs connected to the table.  The food was expensive for kids (especially when your kid eats only 4 bites of macaroni and cheese and a few pieces of celery), but the food was very good.  And we were paying for the experience, right?!

After lunch, we headed to the doll hair salon.  Oh yes, you read that right.  You can pay to have your doll's hair done.  We limited Kayley and Amelia to the cheapest service, which cost $10.  Amelia at least had them pull her doll's hair up.  We only had them comb through Kayley's doll's hair and put the braid headband in.  They sprayed something on the doll's hair to comb through it and I assumed they had a special formula (I've read about using fabric softener with water).  When I asked the lady what it was, she told me it was just water.  So, yes, I paid $10 to have someone spray water on the doll's hair and comb through it (well, and put a headband in).  But, Kayley loved it so it was $10 well spent...

After American Girl, we took a cab to the Lyric Opera of Chicago for The Sound of Music.  It was amazing!  Our seats were fantastic.  Billy Zane was Captain Von Trapp.  I am not sure who played Maria, but she was really good.  Kayley and I love the movie.  She has seen it numerous times so she really enjoyed it because she understood the storyline.

Kayley was clearly exhausted when we got in the car to drive home at about 4:45pm.  She slept almost the entire way home!  It was a great weekend with great friends!

While we were gone, Andy took Drew and Ryan to Bicycle Safety Town.  They had an eventful day as Drew met up with a curb and the curb won.  You can't see it in this picture, but he has a scrape from the middle of his calf all the way up to the middle of his thigh on his left leg.  Poor kid!  But, a popsicle seemed to make things better!