Chicago Adventures...

My daughter convinced me to catch the 8am train into Chicago on Sunday morning for a trip to Textile Discount Outlet - and I’m really glad she did.

If you sew, design, create costumes, love fashion, or honestly just appreciate creativity in any form, this place feels like stepping into another world. Three massive floors overflowing with fabric, lace, trims, buttons, beads, ribbon, appliqués, and every texture and color combination imaginable. Every aisle feels like possibility.

The building itself has this wonderfully chaotic charm to it. Nothing is overly polished or curated. Bolts of fabric are stacked everywhere, baskets are overflowing, and there’s this constant feeling that if you dig long enough, you’re going to discover something incredible hidden between the rows. It’s the kind of place where creative people could lose hours without even realizing it.

And she absolutely loved it.

She’s really taken a liking to sewing and fashion design lately, and it’s been so fun to watch. She walked aisle after aisle touching fabrics, holding colors next to each other, flipping through trims, imagining what things could become. Every so often she’d stop, light up, and say, “Wait… look at this one.”

As a parent, those moments kind of stop you in your tracks.

Because at some point, your kids slowly stop becoming extensions of your world and start becoming fully themselves. They develop interests and talents and passions that are uniquely theirs. You start getting little glimpses into who they’re growing into, and it’s one of the most beautiful parts of parenting.

Watching her sort through fabrics reminded me so much of watching younger kids in a toy store - except now the excitement is creative. Vision-based. She wasn’t just shopping; she was imagining. Designing. Creating entire outfits in her head before they even existed.

And maybe that’s what made the whole day feel so special to me.

In between fabric hunting, we grabbed breakfast at Bagel & Bean, sharing the sidewalk with approximately 1,000 of Chicago’s boldest pigeons, all fully convinced they deserved part of our breakfast sandwich. We laughed, drank our refreshers, and watched the city wake up around us.

There’s something really comforting about those simple days with your kids once they get older. No major event. No big vacation. Just a train ride into the city, conversations about fabric choices, and wandering through aisles together while she figures out what she likes. And on the train ride home, she fell asleep on my shoulder... and it was one of the best moments I've had in a long time.

Isn't she the cutest??

I think sometimes people assume parenting gets less magical as kids grow up. In some ways, sure, you lose the little hand-holding years and bedtime stories and cartoons on Saturday mornings. But what you gain is this front-row seat to watching a human being become exactly who they’re meant to be.

And that’s pretty incredible too.

I don’t know exactly what her future will look like. Maybe fashion design. Maybe something adjacent to it. Maybe something completely unexpected. But watching her this weekend - confident, inspired, creative, curious - I couldn’t help but think that whatever path she chooses is going to be a bright one.

And I feel really lucky that I get to witness it.