Happy Girls, Happy Moms

We had some visitors last week--lovely, lovely visitors from Indianapolis. Sara brought her two darling girls to entertain my darling girls, and the moms were left with nothing more to do that sit around, eat limey popcorn (have you tried Orville Redenbacher's Lime and Salt microwave popcorn? It's delicious!) and talk. Well, maybe we had to referee once or twice. . . and the kids occasionally wanted to be fed (can you believe the nerve?), but it was fantastic.

We started with playing in the water. (That's my cute neighbor Simone wielding the Hose of Power.)

Libby is only six weeks younger than my Olivia, but I think she might, just might, be half Livi's size. She weighs the same amount Mimi does.
And by happy coincidence, Mimi and Jenna had twinner swimsuits. It was the delight of their little lives.
On Thursday, the rain forced us to come up with something a little different (although I'm not going to lie. We let the girls wear their swimsuits out in the rain all morning while Sara showed me how to make a Whirligig Quilt. I figured that 10,000 dirty beach towels was a small price to pay for a morning of peaceful bliss.) We went to HealthWorks Museum with some coupons the girls got for Christmas from the residency. They have a fun climbing wall. . .
. . . but this light-up floor was the real hit. The game consists of jumping on those lighted "bugs." It's my personal favorite game in the museum, and normally I insist on playing it over and over again, knocking all kinds of little kids out of my way, sending them bawling back to their mothers. However, I tried not to show that side of my personality when I was with Sara. So the girls actually got to play.
We got home just in time to grab our wonderful babysitter, Madeline, and then Sara and I headed out to the real reason for her visit: The free, live "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"* show in Chicago's Millennium Park. Here is our host, Peter Sagal, whose physical appearance was a disappointment at first, but whose voice and quick wit I love so much I had forgotten that disappoinment by the end of the show. (Peter, if you are reading this, sorry for the implied insult. You're welcome for the backhanded compliment.) To his left is Carl Kasell, whose voice is so awesome it didn't matter what he looked like, I could never be disappointed. One of these days I'm going to win the prize of him recording the message on our home answering machine. My only real disappointment was that Mo Raca, my favorite of the panelists they use on the show, was not at the live performance. And Tom Bodette, my second favorite: Not there either. And Charlie Pierce, my least favorite, was even more vocal than usual. (So I guess that's three disappointments. But they all fade in my overall memory of things.)

*The NPR news quiz game show. It's usually played on Saturday mornings, but I listen to it almost exclusively as a podcast--for FREE!--from iTunes. If you haven't heard it, you have to try it. It's NPR, so it's definitely liberally biased, but at least it's not trying to present itself as news, like the equally liberally-biased "Diane Reem (sp?) Show" or "All Things Considered" or (heaven forbid!) "Fresh Air with Terri Gros".