Birthday Boy

We wrapped up our yearly birthday extravaganza (four of our five birthdays fall within these two weeks) with a weekend trip away. Clark hit the big 3-0 and doesn't look a day over 28. A good friend of ours did an amazing thing and flew up from VA for the weekend just to watch our kids. (We still don't know anyone here well enough to leave our children with them.) So Mike and Laurie, our travel buddies, gave us Laurie for a few days for Clark's and my birthday. I wish we had had more time to play with her, it was so fun for her to come....fun for us, I'm sure her weekend was more stressful than mine...that's what makes them such good friends!
Laurie flew in on Thursday night--Clark picked her up from the airport so I could take the girls to their first Ballet class. They loved it! Needless to say, we were running a tight schedule so they didn't look enough like pristine Ballerinas to take pictures, I'll get those later.
Laurie and I spent Friday morning tooling around Mystic for some famous pizza and perusing the great shops downtown. Clark got home from school early and we took off for Boston!
We had amazing accommodations thanks to one PKO's Platinum Membership. Our hotel was right downtown and on the 35th floor. Our view was amazing and our bed was beyond heavenly. We felt special and unqualified to be there but soaked it in the best we could.
We hit the town for a quick bite at PF Changs (I love that place and crave it on a regular basis). And just check out our fortunes, we are good together. Then we headed over to the theatre district for a Blue Man Group show. We saw them once in Virginia and loved it. The venue here was much much smaller and almost as entertaining. There were several parts of the show that made us feel as though we were teenagers on some kind of acid trip TPing the neighbor's house. It's hard to explain but it was fun nonetheless. We rode the T back to the mall and capped the night with Ben & Jerry's. It was such a fun evening. We need these times with just one another to slow down and bask in how much we like each other. He is so fun to be with and I just love being near him.
The next morning we ordered room service and enjoyed a delicious meal of bacon and eggs and creamy hot chocolate next to our incredible view of the Charles River and downtown Boston. Then Clark laid on the couch and delved into one of his Birthday books while I took a bath...ahh. We zipped by Faneuil Hall for a short shopping jaunt then headed home to relieve poor Laurie and take her out for some fun and relaxation before she had to return home this morning to her own brood.
We took her to the Mohegan Sun Casino and Resort because it's close and really a site to behold in the calm, wooded New England landscape. We took advantage of Kid Quest, an unbelievable kids' center full of play structures, dress ups and unlimited, free arcade games...I felt guilty like I was shoving them into a den of zombie brain suckers where they were conditioning my kids early to be hopeless gamblers...not too guilty to leave them however so we left for and hour or so and got amazing food at Uncas American Indian Restaurant down the corridor. When we picked them up they enjoyed the eye candy and smoke filled atmosphere of the casino...though we tried to leave before our lungs were too saturated with cigar smoke.
Laurie left early this morning, so sad to see her go. Thank you PKO and Laurie for allowing us to have a fun adult's night away...we have been sufficiently celebrated and rejuvinated!