Weekend Memories

Okay so, this weekend was not what I was expecting. At all.

A few days ago, I got an email from my husband's unit FRG about attending a deployed spouses Strong Bonds retreat which is where you hole up in a hotel for a weekend and attend various sessions on dealing with deployment. It's all inclusive, childcare is even provided and it's always at a good location like the one we attended last year.

Sounds awesome right?

Well. We get to our hotel in Raleigh-Durham only to discover that it wasn't a retreat for deployed spouses, but instead it was a retreat for families. We were just added on to the manifest since they needed a certain number of people to attend. What this meant is that we would not be learning about coping with deployment, and we would not be getting childcare.

Can you imagine our surprise? While we weren't necessarily let down, we were hoping to have a relaxing weekend learning about things applicable to our current situation, and we were definitely looking forward to having some time away from our kids.

But it wasn't all awash. We actually had fun during the team building sessions and picked up a few ideas on how to deal with our children when they get older (if we remember everything, that is).

Plus, it is REALLY hard to be upset when you have great company and free food ;)

We also made the most out of the weekend by visiting restaurants and shops that we don't have back home.

One of my favorites was Babymoon. We stopped here for tea and dessert since we had a bad hankering for drowning ourselves in chocolate and sugar.

The three of us split creme brulee, a brownie pie, and the richest chocolate cake I have ever tried. Everything was SO delicious!

And I think the babies enjoyed watching us get chocolate wasted ;)



Another new favorite restaurant we visited was Rockfish at the amazing outdoor South Point mall. Normally I don't like fried food but they had these awesome jalapeno hush puppies that I couldn't resist. They were just the right amount of spicy for me and you all know that I love that tongue-on-fire spicy!

I also had the tower of sushi and it definitely didn't disappoint! Again, it was just the right amount of spicy for me and you can never go wrong with sushi, especially when it's this fresh.

Besides all of the great food and adorable babies, another highlight of the weekend was all of the shopping we did.

I haven't been to an Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Zgallerie, and Pottery Barn Kids in FOREVER because we unfortunately don't live near any of those stores. So I ended up having way too much fun partaking in the joys of capitalism. But considering the circumstance, I surprisingly didn't do too much damage.

Let's just say the hunk would be proud ;)



After we shopped till our boys dropped, we spent our nights in the hotel hallway outside our rooms watching military documentaries, partaking in much needed "girl talk", and practicing various yoga poses while trying to avoid waking up our sleeping babies.

By the time the retreat ended, I was exhausted and ready to get back home to sleep in my own bed. I love the novelty of staying in a hotel but staying in the same room as a baby isn't really conducive to relaxing. Caleb moves around way too much and makes a ton of noise while he sleeps so I barely got any sleep the whole weekend.

I was also ready to get back to my clean eating routine and get to work on some projects.

And one of the "projects" I'm working on is giving this blog a much needed facelift. It's something that has been on my mind forever and I think it's time for me to let it out. I'm changing the name of this blog and starting over. As I mentioned before, I want to be able to offer training services through the blog, in addition to writing about my daily shenanigans, and I'm hoping that starting a new blog will assist with my goals.

Also, I HATE, LOATHE, DESPISE, the current name of my blog. I think it makes me sound conceited (even if it started as a joke), and it doesn't really encompass everything I blog about. And when we leave Fort Bragg, the name won't really apply anymore.

So yeah, I think I'm way overdue for a change. And I hope that all of you who have made blogging so special to me will come along for the ride as I take this next step in blogging. Any advice for a new name? Haha!

Have a happy and healthy week all!