Adventure to American Girl store

Okay, so I have been a bad blogger, and the blog went dark for over a month. As Pumbaa says, you gotta put your behind in your past. Or something like that, anyway.

So, yesterday, on a semi-whim, we decided to go to the American Girl store in Chicago. It's not exactly a casual trip, entailing just over 100 miles in a car, and then a couple hours along the South Shore Line. There's a bus ride, as well, since really the trip is first to the Field Museum, and then a short hop, skip and crowded bus ride to the AG store. We wouldn't go alone, however - a friend of DW was taking her three girls, and her son, so the nine of us traveled in a small, mostly-behaved pack, encumbered by two strollers, two diaper bags, 6 kids, 3 adults, and a sherpa named Mahesh.

The Field museum was a blast, as always, and DS loved the dinosaurs. The kids loved being carried around by me - I can still manage to pick up any two or three of them at a time, though I could feel it this morning. But, after several uneventful, noisy, and generally exhausting hours, we departed the museum for the real purpose of the trip - to pay homage at the shrine to the American Girl Doll.

Now, I know that these things are expensive. And, I know that no toy company worth its salt would fail to offer Kit's Tree House, Kit's typewritter and desk, Kit's various sets of clothing, Kit's depression-era furniture, and a replica steam locomotive, to act out some scene in the movie. The shocker was how busy the place was, in the middle of the day, on a weekday. Already outnumbered in our little group, I was one of the few males over the age of 6 in the store, a fact which became readily apparent during a biobreak.

On a random blog, I saw this picture. Go ahead, take a look; it's completely SFW. Pay attention, if you will, to the rich color choices of the tile and the doll-holder. Now, I wish I had taken a picture of the XY version of the same room. It wasn't bad, per se, in a bus-stop-complete-afterthought kind of way, but wow. Normally the difference in . . . facilities. . . isn't so obvious.

After an indefinite time (not long, say the equivalent to being stuck on "It's A Small World" for about half an eternity), we deperated the store, being a mere 2 bags, which appeared to be on the low end of the scale. A rambling walk, a pizza dinner, and some more rambling took us back to the train station, where we could begin the process of riding back to the cars, to begin the long drive home. We even made it back before midnight, though not by much (stupid eastern time zone).

I'm working on a post about this video, but I have to look up socially acceptable ways to imply that the poster was denied oxygen at crucial developmental moments while still in utero.