The Zoo, Traffic and Allergies

Traffic! Ughhh! I have never been stuck in such horrible traffic! We decided to go to the Brookfield Zoo yesterday. It seems that we were not alone in our decision. Because the weather was so nice, it was free day at the zoo, and most suburban schools were on spring break, we sat for 3-hours in traffic in order to go the 2 miles from Interstate 290 to The Zoo entrance. So much for the nicety of living close to Chicago. We made the best of the situation, though. We listened to music (Switchfoot, Abba). Thank goodness none of the 4 boys became irate and everyone held out on having to go to the bathroom. It was a good thing that we packed some snacks in the car. We did make it into the zoo, finally. All I could think about while we were walking around that crowded zoo was that we could be there any 'ole day while all these people are in school. Why were we part of this insanity! So I made an important decision that I plan to enforce. Since our family homeschools, no matter how much we want to do something with our public schooled friends, we will never go to a large park/museum during "spring break" again! I seem to remember a similar frustration at Navy Pier during Spring break a few years ago while on a trip with these same dear friends.

My allergies symptoms were huge yesterday. I must be allergic to either Maple, Juniper or elm trees. The present pollen count shows that these trees were high in counts in my community. Pollen.com has a great tool for checking out the levels in your community. Check it out here: Pollen.com I have signed up for the automatic alerts so that when the counts go up, I get an email delivered to my email account.