Summer in the City

It's been hot, we will all admit.

This is when the City really shines! I love summer in Chicago. The festivals, the lake, the clinging heat.

Yes, I LOVE the clinging heat.

Somewhere in my Irish, French, Native American, English, German (insert other northern European Country here)blood - lives the unquenchable fire of Italian Gypsies. Yep. I know its there. Well... we think we know. But none the less.

I fell in love with Humidity in Italy and summer in Chicago is nothing short of that promise of swealter.

Besides. Things I can do with the girls - splash parks, third floor pool parties, lake visits. Its the best.

I love summer in Chicago, when the beach beckons and I can pretend I am at "the Shore" when startling greenery pops out and laughter comes easy...

A blessing in muggy green and heat.... Yes. Yes!!!

Okay, but lets be real here. I cannot use my oven. This is really what the urban experience of summer has to be. I cannot make a chicken nugget without heating my entire third floor apartment for hours. What I would give for central air - or a window without bars in there. The bounty of the summer thrown on the grill children begging for lasagna of all things... Oh the Urbanity!!!

Thank God(dess) for watermelon.

I'm an Urbanite?

So, I have been living in the City of Chicago for over 10 years now. I guess that makes me an urbanite. I say, I guess, because this has only recently occured to me - and it has only recently come to my attention what the differences might be.


I am really not that slow.


I think, rather, I was a bit in denial and had some expectations about what my life would magically transform into once we had kids.


I am an urbanite with kids.


Wow. Yes. Incredible. As if no one has ever done that before!


Okay, well... no one in MY family. So no frame of reference and dead set on the urban experience, here we go. I am an urbanite. I find things at IKEA speak specifically to my situation. I feel like if only I had a very tiny washer and dryer life would be easier. I haul two kids and grocieries up three flights of stairs every week. The kids every day! I roll up in my minivan with the top preschool hits a blasting and park in the crazy gravel in our alley. Oh, I do drive, so points off for that I guess. And the Minivan is not exactly urbane.

Also, I am not a stay-at-home urban mom. I think that this rype of new-urban staty at home momis a very different type, and I know there is a lot out there to connect these new kinds of moms and families. I work, my husband works. Both of us at not-for-profits, trying to do good and get by in the world and teach our lovely girls about the things that are most important...

But I digress.

It occured to me today that not only am I an urban mom with kids - I so don't want to be one of THOSE urban moms. You know the ones who totally change the face of the neighborhood or who never partake in what the neighborhood has to offer. "Look girls, that graffiti is called tagging, can you say I have no affliation, take my wallet and go? But hey, isn't it nice to have public art?" I don't want to lose the artistic hip edge that made us move to the awesome City of Chicago in the first place, because really then we should just go to the suburbs. It occurs to me that I am writing this blog so that I will not live in fear of raising my kids in the city -that I will embrace what it means to be an urban mom.

I am learning to cope with the smell of urine in many ways, what an awesome journey this will be.