Crosswords and Cupcakes: come on, feel the illinoise: part one

it's birthday season here at crosswords and cupcakes headquarters. and, to be more precise, it's 30th birthday season. and rogray's is just around the corner on monday, june 30th.

it's his golden year!! which means this is slated to be one of the best year's of his life and it's shaping up to be:

1: we are working on our play.

2: he is going to grad school.

3: he gets to marry me.

see? best year evs!

since this is such a special year i decided to go all out for mr. rogray and planned a whole surprise weekend. last thursday i gave rogray an envelope and said "here's your first clue about what we are doing this weekend."

he opened it and saw a picture of an airplane. i had him double check what i had packed and told him we had to wake up at 5 so naturally we stayed up until 1am watching tv. genius!

the next morning on the way to the place that has the planes i gave him another envelope. he opened it and saw a picture of a skyline. but what skyline?

it was a tense car ride while rogray used the power of sleep to figure out what city has that skyline. when we got to the airport i finally let the cat out of the bag that we were going to. . .CHICAGO!!! yay!!!

rogray was a little confused. . .chicago? why chicago? and i was all "we never do things like this" and he was like "yeah, 'cause were poor" and i was all "yeah but we can do stuff like this" and he was all "yeah, 'cause we don't have kids and stuff." it was 5:30 in the morning so cut us some slack.

this is what rogray looked like for most of our flight:

but then i woke him up and he looked like this:

yup. still sleepy.

when we landed i gave him another envelope that were clues as to what we were doing. one was a picture of this:

and of steak. so he knew we were going to the Art Institute and having a steak dinner. but he didn't know everything. . .not even close. . .

we hopped on the el (hip, chicago lingo) and went to our swank hotel compliments of rogray's dad. i told rogray that his dad treated us to the hotel so he wouldn't get suspicious when we walked in and the lobby looked like this:

we settled in and took a quick nap and then i woke him up and told him it was time for a walk and some lunch. so we took a quick stroll and i was texting away and rogray seemed a bit confused as to why i was texting all of my friends on our special trip. as we walked through millenium park and i pointed to the cafe we were going to eat at he was looking around at all the sights which was good because he didn't see his next big surprise right away: his dad and stepmom!

yay surprise parents on our trip! we had a lovely lunch at the restaurant in millenium park and since they had already done the art institute we went by ourselves. but it was being attacked by lions! lions that needed to be stopped!

rogray was very impressed that i was fighting the lions:

the lions that had huge balls:

for some reason the balls came as a surprise to me -- i just never would have thought to put balls on a lion sculpture. props sculptor person!

we went in and had a great time seeing famous paintings and not so famous paintings and i felt like a real nerd when i laughed out loud at this piece:

i'm not really going to go into it but the curtain isn't real and the whole thing is silly. . .ah, the flemish painters.

we went down to the "exploratory" part of the museum and discovered that even with all that armor mid-evil knights could still give someone the finger adequately: