Summer is in the air – hooray! To find the coolest parks, playgrounds, pools, play spaces, restaurants, and more, look no further than Chicago’s ultimate guide for parents of the pint-sized crowd, on the go!

That’s it! Now you’re automatically entered to win over $350 worth of prizes, including:

- An adorable new bathing suit courtesy of Little Threads

To enter, just type the code “FITL” on the join page!

For the cost of a cup of coffee each month, you’ll enjoy:

- Kids Eat Free Calendar, Museum and Attraction Free Day Calendar, and Storytime Calendar

Don’t forget: Join on the go by June 1 and you’re entered to win the Summer Gift Package, valued at over $350! What’s that code again?  You guessed it: FITL!

The Printers Row Lit Fest was founded in 1985 by the Near South Planning Board to attract visitors to the Printers Row neighborhood (once the city’s bookmaking hub). By 2002, it had grown to five city blocks (on Dearborn, from Congress to Polk), attracting more than 200 booksellers from across the country displaying new, used and antiquarian books, and featuring seven stages with more than 100 free literary programs.

As part of its ongoing commitment to the written word and its support of literacy and literary endeavor, the Chicago Tribune purchased the Printers Row Book Fair in 2002 from the Near South Planning Board. Recently renamed to be the Printer’s Row Lit Fest, it is considered the largest free outdoor literary event in the Midwest-drawing more than 125,000 book lovers to the two-day showcase.

Booksellers, publishers, literacy and cultural organizations sell and promote books and book-related merchandise and distribute related information. Many of the independent booksellers participating in the Fest represent the diverse ethnic and cultural communities of the Chicagoland area and sell books of different languages and genres.

What: Old Town School of Folk Music: “Each week a different teacher will bring in a handful of songs covering a theme, or an artist, or a genre. The experience is open to all levels and all instruments, so bring your friends or family to just hang out and sing. This is a wonderful opportunities to meet other players and folks who share your musical interests. On top of that you go home with at least a dozen songs! Hey, just because it says 6-string doesn’t mean you can’t bring 4 or 8 or 12! Heck, just come and sing!”

When: Fridays @ 6:30pm-8pm

Where: Old Town School of Folk Music @ 909 W Armitage Ave

How much: $5 admission! Register here!

Visit the event page to find out more!

Explore Chicago tells us:

Kick off your weekend on Saturday mornings from June 9 – September 1, 2012 with an energizing workout on the Great Lawn of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. Supported by McDonald’s® and presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, these free workout sessions will be held from 7 am to 11 am.

Workouts are 45 minutes long with classes in Tai Chi at 7 a.m., Yoga at 8 a.m., Pilates at 9 a.m. and Zumba®, a Latin-inspired calorie-burning dance fitness party, beginning at 10 a.m. Returning this year, there will be live music played over Millennium Park’s state-of-the-art sound system for the yoga and pilates classes. Workouts are free and are open to people with all levels of experience.

The complete Saturday morning workout schedule for the season is as follows:

June 9 – 30

7 am – Tai Chi: Stirling Tai Chi
8 am – Yoga: Chicago Park District
9 am – Pilates: Frog Temple
10 am – Zumba: TEAMiFIT
Music during yoga and pilates by Perrin Stamatis

July 7 – 28

7 am – Tai Chi: TAI CHI Calm Chicago with Hillary Johnson
8 am – Yoga: Lani Granum
9 am – Pilates: Core Chicago Pilates
10 am – Zumba: Diane Garvey and Regina Mundt
Music during yoga and pilates by Carlo Basile and Bob Garrett

August 4 – September 1

7 am – Tai Chi: Taoist Tai Chi Society of the USA
8 am – Yoga: Yoga 312 with Amy Cronk and Joshua Wentz
9 am – Pilates: Chicago Park District
10 am – Zumba: Leslye Jones-Beatty
Music during yoga and pilates by Joshua Wentz

I’m a man. With this manly power comes responsibility. This includes all things vehicular, minor home repairs, and how to pleasure a woman. Over the years, I’ve found a mechanic and repairman to take care of the first two, but the third is still all me. The plain truth is that even after years of experience, this remains as obscure as the other two. Yes, sex, even when you’re a happily married bona fide dude, is confusing.

Ladies, men are often just as clueless in the bedroom as you are. Consider the facts. We all know Sex Ed was less than educational, and the talk with Dad at 15 years old was just awkward and unsatisfying (he was the last person I wanted to hear the lurid details from — there’s a reason Oedipus gouged his eyes out, folks). All we really learned was what to do with the tissues crowded deep in the sheets. Locker room talk was all talk, so it comes down to this. Most of us guys have misplaced the crucial How to Drive Her Wild handbook.

So we compensate. We pay extra attention to Hollywood’s sex scenes. We listen, often painfully, as you describe what you need from us. We watch soft porn and feel guiltier and even more puzzled.  And then there are all the mixed messages. In the last couple decades of my sexual existence, I’ve learned that I’m supposed to be masculine but gentle, an alpha male but not too alpha, loving but not weak, and experienced but not a male slut.

Complicated, right?

To show you just how uncertain guys really are between the sheets, here are just some of the thoughts racing through my mind during sex with my wife:

-Am I hard? OK, this is good.

-Did I just hear a kid? No. This is also good.

- Hold on: she’s talking to me. Do I talk back? She wants me to “give it to her hard.” How hard does she mean? Does she mean metaphorically hard, since she also wants me to be gentle?

- She just asked me to swivel my hips. Contrary to what she thinks, most men cannot move their hips like Eddie Murphy in Boomerang. I must remember to tell her to stop watching reruns of this movie.

- I just swiveled my hips and now the pain in my left hip is not going away. Doesn’t she know I’m not this flexible? I can’t even sit cross-legged on the floor. The tension in my hamstrings, if harnessed, could launch a small animal into orbit.

- Ok, got some moans. Can’t really be sure about those though…

- I wish I could kiss her, but I was down below already. Would she think that was weird? Is it weird?

- Did I just get an email? I could have sworn I heard my phone buzz.

- Did she say wanted a quickie? Shit, that just guaranteed it’ll take me an extra 20 minutes to finish.

What this should tell you is that, as you probably already know, guys don’t have all the answers, in the bedroom or underneath the hood of the car, apart from knowing that good lubrication helps both. In fact, we’re fumbling all over the place trying to make sure you’re having a good time, though don’t get me wrong — fumbling can be fun. So be gentle with us, ladies. We could use a little reassurance every now and then.

Taste of Randolph tells us:

Eat, Drink, and be Merry! . . . that’s why we all come every year to Chicago’s Best Street Festival.

Located in the city’s most famous restaurant row, the 15th annual Taste of Randolph Street takes place on Chicago’s Randolph Street corridor.  The Taste of Randolph Street is a food-centric festival in the West Loop, a neighborhood that boasts some of the best cuisine in the city.

Home to Stephanie Izard’s Girl & the Goat, Veerasway – Indian food with a twist, and Italian-focused Vivó, Randolph Street is the ideal location for a culinary celebration.  Attracting city dwellers and suburbanites in numbers in excess of 100,000, including, in 2010, Vince Vaughn and his wife, Taste of Randolph Street promises to excite and entertain the senses.

Chicago’s hottest singles never miss this chic and sexy weekend in Chicago’s  upscale West Loop on Friday June 15h through Sunday June 17th.

Where

On the six-block stretch of Randolph Street from Peoria Street and Racine Avenue, you can explore hand crafted and merchant goods.  Along with two unique stages of incredible live entertainment  and new this year, a hidden DJ dance stage. Celebrate the summertime with live entertainment featuring world famous recording artists.

Read More

~By Melanie Wiley-Bachmeyer

Like other bundles of joy, our sweet baby, George, also packs an insomnia-filled punch. For ten straight months, my husband and I have struggled to catch a solid five hours of sleep, with George waking up and demanding milk and some prime real estate in our bed.

Yes, I’m still calling it “our” bed, even though George has gradually appropriated it for his own use. Take a snapshot of us at 2:30 am, and you’ll find George wedged between my husband and me, arms splayed in spread-eagle fashion. Before we know it, it’s 5:30 am and the stuffed animals in his crib have gone cold in the absence of his body warmth. Then we wade through another feeding session and sleep until 7:30 am. Rise and — yawn — shine.

It’s little wonder that I’ve taken to scouring every parenting guide, as well as the Internet, for solutions. The sheer abundance of blog posts and articles on the subject of sleep training is enough to cause major confusion and panic. But I persist. Five, maybe even six, hours of continuous sleep isn’t really that much to ask, after all. Or is it?

Expert Advice

Once I begin reading, my parenting self-esteem inevitably takes a nosedive. Most babies, it seems, are sleeping through the night by six months of age. Six! So I’m clearly missing something. How do they do it? The majority of experts advocate — and I knew, just knew, this was coming — letting your baby learn to self-soothe, two alliterative words that sound seductively simple.

Loyalists of this method make the process sound like one long bubble bath. After all, what could be more soothing than self-soothing? Plus, it’s got some heady backers. Even my pediatrician has advised me to let George “cry it out,” though this particular phrase is not as sexy as “self-soothe.” Whatever you call it, though, don’t kid yourself: it’s gut-wrenchingly hard.

Self-soothing goes something like this: an innocent baby, like George, must bawl his little eyes out for 15 to 30 minutes before falling asleep.

Yes, self-soothing can take up to 30 minutes. When the pediatrician said to let George cry for up to half a hellish hour, I nodded silently, all the while thinking no way do I have that kind of will power. George may be in the bottom 10% as far as size goes, but I’m convinced he outranks the entire free and not-so-free world in sheer persistence. But I felt I had no choice but to give it a go.

The Test

At 2:30 am, knowing that I breastfed him an hour prior, I decided this would be the perfect time to put self-soothing to the test. Just as he began crying, I reassuringly whispered to my husband, “Please don’t move. He’ll cry himself to sleep soon.”

Seeing his demands unmet, George’s wails immediately became all the louder and more desperate. It wasn’t long before we witnessed him raise himself up on his two roly poly legs and begin screaming (and I swear pointing) at us with the full force of his preverbal outrage. We pulled the comforter over our heads and scrambled for earplugs. If it we didn’t know it before, it was obvious now that our son had far more determination than we did.

It was only a matter of time — I’d say around two minutes full minutes — before I bounced up out of bed and soothed him myself. He fell asleep within seconds, tightly holding a large piece of my hair in his hand. Self-soothing, I couldn’t help but think, is for suckers.

Now What?

Making choices about sleep is a little like online shopping. Sometimes you need to hunt around to find the best deal. With the self-soothing option way out of our family’s picture, I’m now turning to the experts who don’t tell me to toughen up.

The Sears, it turns out, are right up my easy-does-it alley. I’m looking to them for self-confirmation, not self-soothing, and I have to say their methods rock. My husband and I are still not getting all the sleep we desire, but George is in better spirits after dark, and when George is happy, everyone’s happy.  Like myself, the Sears team advocates tending to whatever the baby’s needs are at the time. Your baby, they assure you, will eventually sleep through the night, “eventually” being the key word in my situation.

Am I guilty of cherry picking parenting advice? Of course! But that’s the beauty of being a parent in the first place. I get to do things my way. I get to call the shots, at least when George says I can.

We got the pic from inhabitots.

Over the past decade, as many of my friends and family members have gotten married, hubby and I have occupied ourselves, probably too often, with conversations about which couples we thought would last and which wouldn’t. I’d say our predictions have been wrong about, oh, 100% of the time. Couples we thought were mismatched have held it together, while the seemingly contented ones imploded almost instantaneously.

Divorce isn’t a new phenomenon, obviously. As a child of a broken home, trust me, I know. But in the past decade of baby making, diaper changing, and preschool hunting, I haven’t seen it a whole lot among my friends. Or their friends. Smugly, I thought, maybe my peers and I had discovered the magic formula. Maybe we had made better choices. But, alas, I was wrong.

In the last year, I’ve witnessed what I assume is probably not even the tip of the divorce iceberg. Out of nowhere, I’m receiving texts, Facebook updates, and emails about marriages ending. (Notably, announcements about engagements and marriage are heralded by phone and post, while breakups are only a quick click away.) So far, the final straws for each of the splits have varied: falling in love with and subsequently marrying the nanny, gambling and drug addictions, and the very simple and straightforward, “I just wasn’t in love with him/her.”

The New York Times stated not so long ago that divorce is on the wane. But from what I’m seeing around me, I think they spoke too soon. With the economy improving, even a teensy bit, I believe we’re headed for a spike in the divorce rate. It feels like marriage has become a game of chance. I find myself asking: Who’s next?

Based on my experience so far, I find that question impossible to answer. From what I’ve observed, there are two groups of marriers. The first is made up of starry-eyed couples that wed with the belief that love will conquer all. Ask them why they’re getting married and they’re likely to respond by saying they’ve found their soul mates.

The second group is made up of couples who walk down the aisle with warning bells ringing in their ears. These men and women know they aren’t particularly compatible, but for many reasons – pressure to get married, real estate, reluctance to jump into the dating pool again, financial anxieties, ticking fertility clocks – get hitched anyway.

Then what? Well, life happens. We learn in the first decade of marriage, often the hard way, that long-term relationships are not always a rose-covered, picture-perfect cakewalk. We discover that who we are on our wedding day is not who we are likely to be ten years later. We change, we have kids, we acquire and reveal all of our bumps and bruises, and we hope that our spouses’ evolutions are in synch with ours.

What is it that keeps couples together? I decided it must be a combination of a strong friendship and a big stroke of dumb luck. Friendship, because there are times when the romance recedes into the background and you want to wring each other’s necks. And luck because the kids are safe and healthy, one or both partners have managed to keep a decent paying job, and over the years the couple has grown in a similar direction.

Then a few weeks ago, at a kids’ Passover Seder, I meet the Kanes, a couple that’s been married for almost 50 years. All afternoon, they snuggled together, giggled, and looked as if they were on their first date. I asked their daughter, “Are they for real?” Absolutely, she said. Growing up, her dad would come home from work and make out with her mom as she was preparing dinner.

Maybe, I think to myself as I watched the Kanes look deeply and fondly into each other’s eyes, it’s not all about friendship and luck. Maybe marriage, whether it’s for love, safety, money, security, rebellion, infatuation, fatigue, hope, pressure, or just plain sex, is a choice that defies all theories and categorization. And who manages to stay together, and the reasons they do so, are just as inexplicable.

So as my friends and I plunge into the second decade of marriage, my hunch is that, as the economy improves and the kids wave goodbye to the baby years, we’re going to be hearing the “D” word a lot more. Will it be those who got married with stars in their eyes or those who walked down the aisle with their eyes wide open about their relationships’ weak spots? Considering my success rate so far I’d have to say – with total confidence – that your guess is as good as mine.

~ Wendy Widom, Founder, Families in the Loop

~By Wendy Widom

I don’t ride a Harley, and I don’t have a tattoo or any weird body piercings. Well OK, I did have an unusual body piercing, but it fell into a toilet in Radom, Poland in 1997 and I wasn’t about to fish it out and put it back in. But I digress.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m a pretty normal person and your typical mom. Part helicopter, part tiger, with a Whole Foods logo stamped right in the middle of my forehead, which enjoys – along with the rest of my face – a facial three or four times a year.

I’m telling you all of this so you don’t judge me too harshly when I share this little secret: I let my five-year-old curse.

I grew up with cursing in my home. A lot of cursing. If my father had abided by the rule to add a quarter to the piggy bank every time he dropped the “F” bomb, I’d probably be retired and sitting on a beach right now. I remember feeling scared and a little bit embarrassed when he let loose a string of expletives that would have made a sailor blush. I vowed to never do the same.

But then I went off to college, and a whole new world of cursing opened up to me. Cursing was cool. It was a way to spice up a joke, bond over an injustice, or indirectly express a shared intimacy with another person. If you can’t come home to your gal pals after a bad breakup and share an emphatic “F*ck him!” then what was the point of having friends in the first place?

By the time I got married, I had somehow managed to keep the swearing habit in check. Then I had a baby. In the first year alone, I used the “F” word in ways I didn’t even know existed. I used it as an adjective, adverb, noun, verb, command, and perhaps even a preposition. I discovered that I have a way with words, at least the ones you see written on the back of a dive bar’s bathroom doors.

Now back to my kid. Once she began to speak, I carefully curtailed the cursing, in the same way I encouraged her caregivers to avoid use of the word “no.” (See? I’m all about redirection rather than negativity; that’s the kind of mom I am.)

When she was two, her dad accidentally said “sh*t” in front of her. Sound the alarm, sound the alarm! We panicked and convinced her that Daddy had actually said the word “chair” instead. Which meant that, for about a year, every time she fell she’d exclaim, “Oh, chair!”

But lately I’ve changed my mind about the whole cursing restriction. Maybe it’s these rough and tough times, maybe it’s because she’s about to hit the hallowed halls of kindergarten, or maybe it’s because I’ve decided I don’t give shit: I’ve decided to let my kid curse.

I now encourage her to let loose. I ask her what S-H-I-T spells. And I giggle when she says it. The same goes for the word “ass.” When I’m having a tough day, there’s nothing like hearing a cute and overly articulate five-year-old say one of those two words with a big shy and mischievous grin on her face.

Does this earn me the Worst Mom of the Year Award? Maybe. But I’m trying to teach my daughter, who is already worried about what teachers and friends think of her, that she doesn’t have to fit some perfect mold. I want her to know that she can contradict other people’s expectations of her and that their opinion shouldn’t jeopardize her self-esteem.

So let’s all encourage our kids to be rule breakers. Let’s allow for the occasional “shit” here, an “ass” there, and a grammatically correct “damn” whenever the kids need to break free of social conventions. It will help them express themselves and teach them that they can handle a disapproving glance every once in a while. Doesn’t that sound fantastic? Hells, yeah!

We got the pick from our friends at mummypages.