We're back from Rochester. We had a pretty good trip and and a pretty good report on Katie. The good news is that she doesn't have to go through surgery right now, which is a huge relief. Here erosion of the esophogaus has gone from a grade C to a grade A which is good news. The bad news is that her previous surgery (called a belsey procedure) where they took out the tumor and wrapped something around her esophogaus didn't take very well and acid is still coming up even with a double dose of nexium. This means that unless this corrects itself or the new medicine really helps sometime in the future she quite possibly will have to go through the surgery again. But the good news is that we don't have to do it this summer. Hooray!

On the Lacy front, she is as cute as ever. Last week she began saying a new phrase out of the blue. I was holding her and she lunged to Katie and said "I aunt choo mommy" or I want you mommy. Since then she's been saying it like crazy. She also has learned how to climb into and out of her stroller by herself. This is quite an event because to do this she has to climb over the little food and drink bar on the front. The first time she did this last week in Rochester I told her "you did it". She looked at me with a huge grin and shouted "I did it!". It was adorable and since this she climbed in and out of it all week shouting "I did it!". Today she started something else, I was singing and she looked at me and told me "daddy sing". She also started putting socks on her hands last week and playing with the little sock puppets. Today she put my socks on her hand and chased me around with them while laughing hysterically.

Oh yeah, we ended up driving back through Chicago from our trip to Mayo. We were lucky enough to have no tests or appointments on Friday so on Thursday night we drove the 5-6 hours from Rochester to Chicago and stayed their until Saturday night. I'm glad we did. It was a lot of fun. I've never been to Chicago and really enjoyed it. All we really did was walk around all of the downtown and near downtown neighborhoods and just soak everything in. We calculated that we walked about 12-15 miles both Friday and Saturday. The one thing I can say about Chicago is that they have an amazing number of high end shopping places. I was also impressed by the number of skyscrapers. They were everywhere, in fact right outside the hotel that we stayed in (the Hyatt Regency Chicago) was the third largest skyscraper in the U.S. (the Aon Building). To give you an idea of how tall it was, we were on the 31st floor of the hotel and had a floor to ceiling window. I could stand at the window and look up and from our room I could not see the top of the building. (Did you know that Chicago has more of the 50 tallest skyscrapers than any other city in the world?)

As big as the city was, it still seemed small in the downtown area at the same time. What I mean by this is that you could walk all over the downtown and near downtown areas fairly easily. We walked all over the place, from the Sears Tower to Navy Pier, to the Magnificent Mile to Old Towne Chicago. All in all we had a great time.