August 18th: Cubs Game!

The big day we had been waiting for was finally here.  We decided to take the train and the "L".  I thought that would be fun for the kids, and easy.  The only problem was our train on the way there was delayed 20-25 minutes because of construction on the tracks in Downers Grove.  Then we walked past the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) to get to the brown line.  Our train on the brown line was having issues.  The problem was the doors wouldn't open.  So we were a little delayed again.  We finally got to where we needed to transfer to the red line.  We got on that and didn't have any more problems, but the train delays caused us to get to the stadium later than I'd planned.  Not a big deal, we just changed the plan we had for lunch, and ate in the park (cha ching) instead of outside the park.  I can not describe how beautiful Wrigley Field is to me.  I was so excited to take my family.  I'm sure none of them really appreciated it (except maybe Anders) as much as I think they should.  The Cubs have not had a great year (we've been rebuilding our team for the last 100 years), and we planned on them losing, but we still had a great time.

The essential picture in front of Wrigley

View from my seat (not bad)

Essential scoreboard picture

Each of the kids in front of the field

Soriano stole third!  I love baseball live!

Ramirez (one of my remaining favorite cubbies, since we had just heard Derek Lee got traded thanks to the old codgers sitting behind us.  Josh said they were hilarious.  Anders thought they were annoying.  They just talked the whole time.)

I took pictures to keep Hadley occupied for the first couple of innings.

I think Hadley only made it to the 4th or 5th inning, then crashed until the 8th.  When she woke up she started crying and said, "I hate this.  I hate basketball.  I want to leave."

Singing the 7th inning stretch

This picture has many elements of Katia's Wrigley experience.  First, she became fast friends with the lady sitting next to her.  Katia talked to her most of the second half of the game, and the lady was nice enough to talk with her.  The girls sitting behind us had pink Cubs shirts, and Kate really wanted one.  You can also see the shorts of the man of a couple sitting a row in front and down a few seats.  They had gotten a bag of peanuts.  Well, first Katia's new friend gave her some peanuts, then she (the friend) was talking to the other couple and found out they weren't going to take their opened almost full bag of peanuts home because they had a son at home allergic to peanuts, but they enjoyed having some at the game, so Katia's new friend asked if Katia could have it, and got her a very full bag of peanuts which Katia would pull out on occasion on the car ride home whenever she got hungry.

On the way home, the trains were much better.  We almost didn't make it on the red line game train because Fischer lost his hat somewhere, and Josh went back to look for it, but had no luck, and we made the train minus one hat.The L on the way home.

We caught the express metra train home, which the kids liked much better.  It was a lot faster than on the way there.