(Extended) Mother's Night Out

Thanks to Allan's generosity, Marcia and I enjoyed an extended Mother's night out. It was only Marcia's second time overnight without the children and it was my second or third night away not on business. On Saturday, we road the (Acela!) train to Philly arriving at about 2:00pm. We headed straight to hotel Sofitel (Bonjour!) where we were staying and while we were waiting to check in and waiting for our room to get ready we spent about 40 minutes with the hotel Concierge planning our trip. He arranged our dinner reservations, evening entertainment and spa treatment for the next day. He was the best!

After we checked into our room and tested our our super comfy beds, we did a little window shopping. We had a wonderful dinner at Sampan where we tried many different (not so small) modern Asian dishes. You are going to drop dead on the floor when you read this but one of my favorite dishes was the brussel sprouts. I know! I also loved the Papaya and Kobe beef salad and the lobster goyza.

After dinner we went to a play called Becky Shaw which was a 5 person cast show. The playwright is Gina Gionfriddo who is a producer/writer of Law and Order. It is a funny and serious story about a date set up and the date is a little wacky and sets in motion a number of events that the family then has to deal with. I have to admit that when I first sat down and the show started, I was expecting them to break into song. Musicals are the only shows I have seen recently. Also there was quite a bit of swearing in the show. I kept thinking "what's with the swearing?" and Marcia and I would keep looking at each other thinking "what with all the swearing?". I think it's because we both have this heightened hearing for swear words...whenever their is swearing on the TV or radio we change it so the kids don't hear and I haven't been to an adult play/musical for a really long time. After dinner and the play we went back to our hotel and had fresh, homemade ginger ale and an apple tartin with cinnamon ice cream in our hotel bar. Yum!

The next day we went to the Spa, Marcia got her hair cut and I got a facial. After that we did some more shopping and then had a fantastic late lunch at the Continental restaurant. It was delicious and probably the best meal we had. I had the veggie burger and french fries and Marcia had a corn, pablano and cheese omelet. For dessert we shared the "liquid" chocolate french toast which was totally to die for. After lunch we headed back to the train station for our 4:12 departure and we got into DC at about 5:45pm. It was a really nice and relaxing trip. We had such a great time.

While I was in Philly the boys went to see Princess and the Frog and ate dinner at McDonald's. They totally love it when I go away because they get to eat at McDonald's. The next day they were home most of the day because we were getting Direct TV installed. Sadly, our run of free cable has ended. Over the last year, the channels kept dropping and dropping. It was a good five year run!

Today we went over to Becs and Jake's house for a wonderful lunch of butternut squash lasagna, salad, baked ziti, roasted cauliflower and garlic bread and for dessert Bec's made the most delicious pumpkin chocolate bundt cake. It was such a wonderful meal and amazing company. Doris was with us and Kevin, Sarah and beautiful Liam. He (Liam of course) was so amazingly good the entire day we were with him. He sat quietly and content in his chair while we ate and he was happy to let us all play with him and hold him. He's a fantastic baby. (I'm going to try to add the cake and lasagna recipes on the sidebar of our blog too!)

Aidan and Leo love Becs and Jake's house because they are super nice, let the boys play Wii and because they have two cats, Reggie and Dewey. The loved watching Reggie jump in and out of the cat window/door, they also loved playing with him and his toys!, and they thought it was super cool that Reggie likes to play with (real) mice. They were mesmerized by the (real) mouse split in half in the front yard. Gruesome, I know, but boys like that kind of stuff. Leo was funny and got some toilet paper to pick up a dead bug for Becs and he used toilet paper to get a stink bug for her too! Bugs and mice how cool!