Down Time to Catch Up

This weekend Doug and I got to escape the regular routine for about a day and a half.  Ah, down time.  We had a lot of special moments and a lot more margin when at my parent's in NH, but the hectic week we came back to made this special getaway even better.  We are enjoying this time away because Doug is doing a wedding for a family at the church and they offered to put us up in a hotel downtown.  With it being our anniversary weekend and all, we decided to accept the offer. =)  A morning with no kids around and still sitting amongst the 17 cushy white pillows on the bed at 10am affords me the time to finally get the blog up to date.  (Ok, I'm actually finishing this Saturday night, but oh well, the downtime gave me a head start).

Tuesday I had a super early morning flight with the boys and they did great with it.  It was bittersweet on several levels for me as it is always so hard to leave my parents.  It was also hard because with the early flight, I had decided that it was a good opportunity to bid goodbye to Penn's final nursing meaning that the weaning process would be complete.  Thankfully he didn't seem to mind with all the distraction of eating his breakfast on the plane and that was that.  Before we got to that though, Penn and Grampa had a sweet moment at the airport before we took off.  How precious that Penn finally got comfortable with Grampa!

Tav is an old pro at flying and just sits with his blanket and waits for the attendants to bring him his apple juice and peanuts and ding the bell to let him watch a show on my phone.  He's hilarious.  We had a connection through BWI which was originally going to get us home around 10:30am, but unfortunately our connecting flight was delayed 2 hours so we had to hang around BWI.  I managed to get Penn to take a nap in the stroller while walking back and forth through the terminal all while keeping an eye on Tav watching another show on my phone.  He was a good trooper.  I think he would've preferred to take a nap in the stroller himself!  Here's the one picture I got of the boys that day.  My little fliers.

Wednesday, our first full day home, was, well, FULL.  We had Pella coming to fix a window problem for the first few hours.  While they were there, we took an early walk to WF for some groceries.  When we got back Penn napped and then we headed off to Osceola Parklet for our weekly meetup with Adrianne and her kids.  No pictures as I wasn't really on top of it this week with that.  Too much going on in my head catching up!

Thursday we met up with Allison and her 3 girls (including Mary Boyd, one of Koen's best buds from school).  We had a blast at Highland Park.  The highlight was kite-flying.  Koen earned this kite from his reading prize bag and he did such a great job sharing it, I was so impressed.  

Libby didn't get to fly the kite, but she and Tav enjoyed pretending to be monkeys together.

On Thursday afternoon, Koen and I had a sighting of our newest family member...a groundhog that lives under our back porch.  Gross!  He's quite bold and creeps out when we are all inside to sniff around and munch on the grass, etc.  We have got to get rid of this thing!

Thursday night we had a fun family outing.  A member at our church offered a family photo shoot to us.  We were overwhelmed by the kindness and I was so excited for some professional pics of my boys.  Here's the one we've seen so far.  Can't wait to see everything in a week or so!  Thanks so much, Meaghan!

Friday was a super busy day.  Tavin had his speech therapy appointment in the AM, then he and I ran to Target.  When we got home, Doug took the big boys to the pool and I went into productive hyper-drive as Doug and I had plans to try and leave between 2:30pm and 3pm for our wedding/anniversary weekend.  Man, trying to get away for 36 hours is a lot of work, but it was worth it.  More work, though, was probably left for our dear friends who watched the boys for us.  I think they got baptized by fire in parenting this weekend (just finished getting the run down and the big boys gave them a run for their money...ugh, not a proud moment as a mommy!).  Anyways, things went pretty smoothly routine-wise and Megan and Sky did a great job rolling with the punches (actually there was a literal one that Koen threw at Koen!).  Here's a pic I got of them all at breakfast.

On the other side of town, Doug and I had a lazy morning and then Doug surprised me with an appointment to get my haircut at a salon across from the hotel.  It was a much-needed appointment as I have put this off for about 9 months, or maybe it's been a year (I can tell you the girl at the salon thought I was so negligent about my hair!).  It was a lot of fun to be pampered for a little while.  Thanks, baby!  Doug and I then went out to lunch and then I walked to the wedding location over the river on the North Side and Doug picked up the car.  It was a lovely ceremony and then we had a blast at the beautiful reception at the Carnegie Museum of Art and Natural History.  Here's a pose for the boys.

And here's Doug and I in the amazing room the reception was in.  The ceiling is made of gold and the columns and floors are marble from Greece.  Such an amazing venue!

It was a special weekend and we are so thankful to Erin and Jason and their families for including us in their special day and making us feel like honored guests on our anniversary weekend.  

Well, that's all the time I have to catch up the blog.  Perhaps this week I'll do better at little updates along the way. =)