SYMC

Currently Brian and I are in Chicago for the Simply Youth Ministry Conference. It is part of Doug Fields ministry (in case you're wondering, he was the student minister at Saddleback- Rick Warren's church- for 18 years! So clearly, he has lots of experience :)

We had quite an eventful start to our trip. I stayed up super late (read 2am) working on a cake (more on that later) when we had to get up at 330am to leave for our flight out of New Orleans. Well somehow, Brian and I slept through FOUR alarms Friday morning and HAPPENED to wake up a 4:40am. Cue- Home Alone moment!

Seriously praise the Lord we were able to drive relatively close to the speed limit while still having to stop to get gas, drop the cake off, and get parked and get through security at the airport. We boarded our flight 10 minutes before takeoff! Yikes!

We were both exhausted from not much sleep the night before, so thank goodness we are sleeping in a KING grand bed at the Hyatt :) ha! Seriously the hotel is so cool-looking- I'll try to take some pics of the lobby today to share. Plus the conference is IN the hotel so we don't have to get out in the snow to attend events.

Speaking of snow...this is the view from our window.

We took advantage of the free afternoon yesterday since the first conference event didn't start until 7pm and went downtown! We ate at Giordano's pizza (yum!) and saw places that were used to film Brian's favorite movie (ugh) The Dark Knight. Then we were super touristy and went to the Skydeck of the Sears Tower.

View of the city and Lake Michigan

Pretty cool view eh?

and, some genius decided it would be cool to build these glass pods on the side of the building 103 stories up that you can walk out on. I tried really hard, but only managed to jump out there long enough to get this shot before I darted back to more "solid" ground.

Finally, I miss this kid like crazy! She is currently staying with Honey at our house and we are so thankful that we have wonderful grandparents to care for her so we can go and do things like this. We have been talking with her using our web cams to try to get our "t-bird" fix :)