Reconnecting

This past Friday, my mother volunteered to let all three of my children spend the night with her, and I excitedly let them.  This meant that Kevin and I had a full 24 hours to ourselves!  Just the two of us!  We love, love, love our children, but we need, need, NEED time by ourselves, too.  It's good for all of us.

We started our evening on Friday with dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, La Cozuela.  We talked and talked about life, our kids, and whatever else came to mind, all the while filling our bellies with chips and salsa, fajitas, quesadillas, and huge glasses of Coke.  We didn't have anything pressing to discuss; we just enjoyed being together.

Next we went to Lowe's to check out the flooring department.  Since our dog (Uncle Rico) insists on periodically relieving his bladder on the living room carpet, we thought it best to plan for a new floor.  So we browsed around the store and ended up talking to one of the sales guys for quite a while.  Actually, we did more of the listening than the talking as he rambled on about different things (none of them flooring).  He was very nice, and we enjoyed the conversation.  I think he was hoping to just chat with us till closing time.

From Lowe's we went to a wonderful place that I haven't visited in nearly three years--Marble Slab.  If you've never been to one, you really must seek one out and partake of the amazing ice cream!  I actually had several coupons in my purse, so we had fun handing them out to all the other customers in the store.  Then we perched ourselves on a bench outside and enjoyed our frozen treat of Swiss Chocolate and Sweet Cream ice creams mixed with Reese's peanut butter cups in a waffle cup.  Oh my goodness, it was good!

Next we went to Blockbuster and rented The Bourne Identity, since we had never seen it and heard it was good.  We enjoyed the movie but mostly enjoyed getting to watch it as loudly as we wanted without having to worry about which child we might be waking up.  We finally went to bed around 2:00 in the morning.  We're such college students.  However, we did get up the next morning around 8:30, which seems crazy to us for a day with no children home, but we really had more running around we wanted to do.

So we headed out to NUTS (Neat Used Things for Sale), Hudson's (a store that buys the inventories of other stores that have experienced storm damage, fire, etc.), Ellis (a similar type store), Home Depot, Lumber Liquidators (which we continually called Liquid Lumberdators), and Floor Trader, since we were still shopping for flooring.  In the midst of all that, we also enjoyed lunch at Broad Street and went to see our neighbor's new baby at the hospital!  Lastly, we went to Callaway's Nursery and then back to Lowe's (looking at rugs this time), and we came home with some new plants, which we are hoping not to kill.

It was such a full but very fun 24 hours together!  We no longer take for granted getting to hold each other's hands while walking through a store or parking lot.  We also have a greater appreciation for uninterrupted conversation with each other.  Even after the kids came home, we fed them and put them to bed and then retreated to the back yard, where we sat around a fire in the fire pit, ate cheesecake, and talked if something came up or just simply sat there enjoying being together.  We must do this more often!