Oh you know...

Just another awesome weekend here, folks.

This past weekend we were blessed to be able to attend another Strong Bonds Marriage retreat courtesy of the US Army in beautiful Williamsburg VA. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Strong Bonds is an amazing program and if you fellow military folk ever have the opportunity to attend one, I strongly recommend you do. Even if you have the perfect fireproof marriage, Strong Bonds is a great way for couples to reconnect and learn how to improve an already great marriage, there's always room for improvement.

In our case, I felt as if the retreat was highly needed. The hunk has basically been gone for an entire year and A LOT has happened. In the past year and a half, I got pregnant, gave birth, then raised our son on my own for a bit. I know what I went through is a cakewalk compared to others, but I still struggled at times with loneliness. My family lives halfway across the world so I don't always get to talk to them because of the time difference. And when I needed to talk to my husband, I couldn't just pick up the phone and call him because, hello, he was at war. I maybe had a brief conversation with my husband once every other week or two, if even that.

As a result of never hearing from each other, the simplest things like communicating effectively with each other turned difficult. So it was absolutely perfect that the theme of this weekend was focused on the Five Love Languages, and learning how to communicate with each other in the language our spouse understands.

I can't go into detail of what we learned, but I will say that the quote "Love is a choice, not just a word", really resonated with me and I learned so much from it. After each session, we felt humbled, enlightened, and eager to communicate with each other better than we ever have.

After our sessions ended, we were left to explore all of what beautiful Williamsburg offers. Per many twitter recommendations, our first stop was at the Cheese shop and the Fat Canary to sample wine and the stinkiest of stinky cheeses.

And because everything was so delicious, of course we had to make our way to the wine cellar to purchase even more wine.

Then we spent the rest of the gorgeous weekend walking around downtown and taking in all of the history.

I especially loved this marker as we started walking towards Colonial Williamsburg. This is how it should be people!

  

If you can't tell, we're big fans of Virginia history. But we did pry ourselves away from Colonial Williamsburg long enough to make a pit stop at the farmers market. I'm so glad we did because it was such a cute market!

It definitely made my little farmers market loving heart happy. But after we finished, our feet were ready to fall off from all of the walking. So our next stop was to cruise along the Colonial Parkway with our windows down to take in as much of the beautiful sights as we could. 

Gorgeous, y'all.

We ended our weekend in Williamsburg by stuffing ourselves silly with an astronomically expensive meal at Opus 9. Opus 9 is voted one of the best steakhoues in Virginia and since we had giftcards, we figured, why not? Let the stuffing our faces silly commence!



I had the seared ahi tuna, and the rockfish oscar with real Maryland blue crab meat. After chowing down and wishing I had three more plates to demolish, I can now understand why people drop insane amounts of dough to come to this restaurant. SO freaking good!

Finally, we made one last stop at the Smithfield outlets in North Carolina before heading home.



But we didn't buy anything. Womp, womp.



That's okay though. While some sexy, new, boots would have been nice for the fall, I'm honestly just grateful for Uncle Sam allowing us this wonderful weekend to fall in love with each other all over again. It's just what we needed after a tumultuous year.

I'm also grateful for my multilingual hunk of a husband, he speaks ALL five of my love languages ;)

I hope everyone has a happy, healthy, love-filled, week!

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Psst. Read THIS. Gratitude, Attitude, and Angry Beth.

And keep the Intermittent Fasting questions coming, still working on another post!