Chicago Christmas Begins

 Whitney and my mom have made it to Chicago. They have been here for roughly 24 hours now. They got into Midway (not O'Hare, like I thought they were flying into like normal people) at around 7:30 and made it to my place by 9. I made them breakfast (scrambled eggs and toast like that master chef that I am) and then we spent a few hours unpacking.

We decided to adventure our into the world after that. We stopped at Furious Spoon for lunch. It's a ramen restaurant. I've never been to a ramen restaurant -- I'd never even eaten ramen before yesterday -- and I'm not sure it will be back. Furious Spoon LOOKS super trendy and enticing. It is apparently one of the best ramen restaurants in the country because of course, that's a thing. Never having eaten ramen before, I asked my mom if she wanted to share. THIS was a mistake. You cannot share ramen because you basically need to stick your face one inch over the bowl if you'd like to get any food in your mouth. Either way, Susan and I split their vegetarian ramen (which we added fried tofu and an egg to) and Whitney got something that had pork in it.

We continued on from there, visiting a few stores before heading to our next destination. While my mother and sister are here, we are doing a Hot Cocoa Crawl that I have created. Most of the place we are visiting will be downtown, but this one -- Katherine Anne Confections -- was in my very own neighborhood. I'm going to give a real breakdown of the hot cocoa crawl once all hot chocolate has been sampled but yesterday, we got a flight of three mini hot chocolates (milk, salted caramel and brown butter) and a 7 oz gingersnap hot chocolate. Each one came with its own fancy marshmallow -- our favorite was the cinnamon sugar marshmallow! We've decided that the marshmallows were the real draw there, although they also have some chocolate truffles that I wouldn't mind going back for.

After that, Whitney and my mom got their first taste of the CTA. Actually, they didn't taste anything because you aren't allowed to eat on the bus and you definitely shouldn't eat anything that you find on the bus, but they had their first Chicago bus ride. We took the bus all the way to the Lincoln Park Zoo! They were psyched to find out that the zoo is free 365 days of the year and we were there for the ZooLights (one word? two words? I don't know) display. My friend, Parker, also works at the zoo (for an outside company) taking pictures of kids with Santa, but it was his night off, so what did he do? Meet us at the zoo for some good old fashioned tourism. We got 3D glasses from the gift shop that turned the lights into different shapes -- mine were stars, Whitney's were reindeer, and my mom's were penguins -- and it was kind of trippy. Everyone was disappointed because we didn't get to see Alexander Camelton, the baby camel born at the zoo this summer, who was named after the $10 Founding Father, but we did get to see a lot of other animals.

After that, we got back on the bus, said goodbye to Parker (he got on the bus with us but got off at a different stop) and went to Pequod's for pizza! I take everyone to Pequod's. Haters gunna hate, but it's amazing. Mandy met us at Pequod's and got to be introduced to the rest of the fam for the first time. I also finally got to try their onion rings (I'd seen them before but always got talked into ordering a different appetizer!). After dinner, we Ubered home and I crashed on the couch while my mom and sister shared my extendable bed.

We have big plans for today as well, no hot chocolate but my mom and sister will be introduced to CTW for The Roast of Mister Scrooge!