A break

Apparently, my mom heard my plea last month when I thought I was about to lose my mind.  We had just gotten back from Steve and Steph's wedding, and we were all cranky and missing family.  And then we ran into friends having breakfast out alone while their kids were with the grandparents, and ours were acting like beasts.  And how I said how bitter I was about people who got a night or two away from their kids.

So my parents were here all of last week, keeping the girls home with them instead of "big girl school."  And then they offered to keep the girls all weekend and told Greg and I we could go out of town.  I'll admit we almost backed out ... not because we didn't want to leave the girls.  It was more that "is it really worth it" feeling...  packing, spending hours in the car, feeling like there's a whole lot of work we should be doing around the house.  But we came around eventually and went to Charleston for the weekend.

There are still large parts of Charleston that look like this.

We didn't do much.  We mostly walked around, and shopped, and ate.  But so incredibly nice to be able to decide what *I* feel like doing.  Feeling human again.  Spending time with Greg not talking about chores.  Or poop.  We actually went to a movie (Dark Shadows.  It was awful.), which is no small feat for me.  Normally, I don't have the patience for movies - I always feel like I should be doing something else.

On Sunday morning, we decided to go out to the beach.

Flowers in the dunes.

Dunes, and the Sullivan's Island light house in the distance.

The streaks are sand blowing across the beach.

Jellyfish.

So, so, so glad Greg and I had some time together.  We didn't have a schedule.  We didn't have to eat dinner before 6:30 every night.  Bathroom breaks didn't take 20 minutes.

So, so, so thankful for my parents.

Bye bye weekend!

The girls now say "bye bye" to everything, so it's a fitting way to end the weekend.

I always have such grand plans, and always seem to end up just getting by.

We picked up the girls from daycare on Friday afternoon and went to Panera for dinner, with the intent of going to Target afterwards. Panera is a big accomplishment in itself, because they only had 2 highchairs the last time we were there, and so we hadn't been back for a while. But the girls are doing really well sitting on benches and chairs, even without booster seats. They were just behaving pretty badly, though, so by the time we survived dinner, we just wanted to go home. I ended up falling asleep on the couch, semi-intentionally. It feels like such a luxury right now to just grab a fleece blanket, cover myself up, and fall asleep watching Dateline. Julie woke me up around 4am, though, back to reality. And that was a much better night (in terms of the girls sleeping) than usual.

Saturday was a pretty lazy day. Greg ran some errands in the morning, and I went out in the afternoon. Did some shopping for my Valentines. :) We tried a new place for dinner (Sticky Fingers), and the girls did great ... much better than Friday night. Apparently Julie's new favorite food is ketchup. She kept asking for more, and was dipping just about everything in it. Part of the way we gauge how well dinner goes is how long we get until we have to pull out the goldfish (which sounds like "go peesh" [Emma] or "guppies" [Julie] depending on who is saying it.)

I forced Greg to take a day to himself on Sunday and go skiing again. The ladies and I went to Target and the grocery store in the morning, with no one getting locked in the car this time. Success. I brought bribes this time, too... these little gummies that they were screaming for. They did really well holding hands in the parking lot, though they were screaming about the red "balls" (those huge concrete ones) out in front of Target. And when we got to the door of the grocery store, they quickly broke ranks and RAN for the car shopping cart. Emma had to sit in the cart part, and I thought she'd be mad, but she loved organizing all of the groceries, and handing me everything when we got to the checkout. They took a good nap this afternoon, and I swear I was up and cleaning the entire time they were napping, but you sure can't tell by looking at the place.

I didn't take any pictures this weekend, but I did discover a few that I hadn't seen from Grandma and Grandpa S. They brought the girls these cute new barettes.