Grown-Up Getaway

This weekend JP and I celebrated our 5 year wedding anniversary (and the 9th anniversary of our first date) by spending a night at the Hotel ZaZa in downtown Houston. We drove over Friday afternoon to see my dad's parents for a little while and then headed over to my parents' house for pizza and bed.

On Saturday morning JP and I left the kids in the competent care of their grandparents and headed downtown for our first night away together in nearly 2 years. We checked in to our beautiful room, got lunch at my old favorite Mexican place (we lived downtown for a few months before we got married), and then headed to the pool where we wasted the next five hours of the day. I started and finished a fluffy new romance novel that I picked up at CVS on our way back from lunch, JP read some terribly boring and historical non-fiction volume that probably had no romance whatsoever, and we both spent a lot of time people watching. There were a LOT of old, almost certainly very rich, men with young, very good looking women with large sunglasses, tiny swim suits, and multiple bottles of champagne. It was a good time. At one point someone at the hotel dropped a few dozen blown-up beach balls off the 12th story roof of the hotel down to the 2nd story pool. Of course the first thing I thought was how much Landon would have loved it. We also got complimentary popsicles, sunglasses, and flavored waters. I almost ordered a margarita but balked when I overheard the $12 price tag. We may be living it up as a temporarily child-free couple, but I couldn't let go of reality quite that much!

We headed back to our room around 4 and were surprised to find a complimentary bottle of champagne, bowl of raspberries, and chocolate covered strawberries for our anniversary. Many glasses of champagne and a decadent daytime nap later, we headed out to dinner at Backstreet Cafe. It was delicious and we finished out the evening with free drinks at the hotel bar. Later on JP fell asleep easily, of course, and I laid in the extremely comfortable hotel bed reading through your comments on my last post on my blackberry. Thank you for all of them. I woke up early this morning and for once vowed to be a good wife and not immediately wake up JP to entertain me. Instead, I put on workout clothes and headed to the hotel gym. (I don't want to jinx it by dedicating a whole post to my new and shocking dedication to the gym, but I've gone six out of the last seven days and I haven't had a cookie or french fries. I have also made lots of new delicious recipes full of fresh produce. But pretend like I didn't just type that because that usually means I will stop doing it immediately.) After my work out I did wake up JP because seriously, who can sleep for over 10 hours? That's more indulgent than a $12 margarita. We rounded out our stay with breakfast for two in the hotel restaurant (also free - these poor hotels, desperate to get people to vacation in Houston in August, have fantastic weekend getaway packages).

It was wonderful to get away for 24 hours and it was more than wonderful to get back to my parents' house and hug my children. We missed them and talked about them a lot, but we also managed to spend lots of hours not missing them and not talking about them. It was perfect. So thank to my parents for giving us our first night away in a very long time and for making Landon think he was at a particularly awesome summer camp (pancakes for dinner! four books before bed! a new bird house that HE MADE! maybe with a little bit of help from Papa.). Now we're back for my last week of maternity leave. I'm suddenly desperately sad that it's ending, but that's a post for another time. For now I'm just going to enjoy the afterglow of our mini vacation and the fact that after 9 years I enjoy JP's company as much as ever.