A few weeks ago I got to go on a little surprise stay-cation with my good friend Susan for her birthday. It was seriously one of the best weekends ever! So much fun! I wrote about all the details because I didn't want to forget about all the fun.
Me with my beautiful flowers and sweet card.
The birthday girl with her huge bouquet of flowers.
Shopping at City Creek
View from our hotel room. I could see Chad's work from our room.
Seriously this bouquet was so huge and beautiful!
Back from our morning run up by Memory Grove.
Susan rocking her cute pink Nike's.
Missing the $2 I had stuffed into my shoes before we went running. Not sure where in the world it went.
This was my favorite at the sidewalk chalk art festival at the Gateway.
Stopping for ice cream after we hit the all.
Susan and me at the Gateway.
Me attempting to hold all the flowers as we drove home.
Last Friday morning we woke up and were slowly getting ready when I got a phone call from Chad. He told me to hurry and get ready and invite my friend Susan to go do something because her husband needed her out of the house for her birthday surprise. So I tried calling her and she didn't answer. No big deal I thought. I called Chad to tell him and he told me to go over to her house right that minute and ask her to go to City Creek. So I did. We both hurried and got ourselves and the kids ready and drove down to City Creek. He told me that we might all be meeting up and going out to lunch together to surprise Susan for her birthday. This whole time I was thinking I was in on the surprise! We get to City Creek and start walking around and I sent Chad a text letting him know that we were there. Little did I know Chad and Nick were already there watching us walk around. We stopped in a store and all of the sudden we turn around and there are Chad and Nick! Then they gave us each a room key to hotel room at the Marriot and said "Go have fun!" as they strolled the children away. Susan and I were in complete shock! Neither of us had any clue that they had planned this! We decided to first go check out our hotel room. We opened the door to our room to find two huge bouquets of gorgeous flowers for each of us with cards and instructions. We again were in shock to see the flowers! So pretty! We sat down and read our cards. They both were such sweet cards and both contained money for us to go shopping, movies, dinner, and whatever else we decided to do with the money. Again we were floored! It really was better than a dream! I couldn't believe how well they had planned it all out! They had obviously gone to a lot of effort and planning to pull this all off. We were so surprised and excited that we didn't know what to do with ourselves. We sat down and made a list of a few things we definitely wanted to do during our weekend away. We then headed back out to shop. After all, we had no clothes to wear other than the clothes on our back...it was time to do some major damage at the mall. :) Susan and I had such a great time trying on clothes, talking, laughing, and being child free. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my children and love being a mom, but it was also so wonderful to just have a break . We ate lunch at the Blue Lemon in City Creek. If you haven't eaten there, you should! It's delicious! Then we walked down to the Gateway and enjoyed looking at the chalk art sidewalk festival. I was so amazed at all these talented people how they made it look so easy to draw all these pictures. We shopped some more and then strolled back to our hotel to relax a bit before heading to dinner. Our overnight bags were sitting in our rooms when we returned. As we opened our bags we were surprised to find that our husbands did an amazing job of packing things we would need for us. Pretty impressive! That night we went to dinner at the Olive Garden. Again it was delicious food. We couldn't finish our meals and so we got some to-go boxes, but we realized we didn't have a fridge in our room. We decided we could give them to the homeless man that was sitting just outside the restaurant. Great idea right?! Wrong! Susan handed him her pizza box, which he gladly accepted and then I went to hand him my box and he said "No thanks." haha Seriously?! Shocked that a man begging for money for food would actually turn down food, I threw my food away in the garbage next to him. Susan and I couldn't stop laughing. Too funny! We walked back to our hotel and then lounged around for a while before we decided to go to the hot tub. We attempted to relax in the hot tub while all the other people in the hot tub chatted about reading AP exams. They were all teachers reading AP exam papers. Interesting crowd. We decided to ditch the hot tub and retreated to our room to lounge while we watched a little HGTV. I blame Susan for me now being addicted to that channel. :) I could hardly sleep that night. Which is ironic considering I had no reason to wake up early and no children to keep me up all night. I guess I was just too excited to spend the next day playing again or something. Who knows. Anyways, neither of us slept good so we got up early and went running up by Memory Grove. There is a gorgeous trail up there and I loved it! Great way to start off the morning! After getting ready we headed back out for more shopping. We were major shop-a-holics on this trip! We decided that we would go cheap this day on our food so we could have more money to shop and go to the movies, etc. haha We stopped in at the City Creek food court and got ourselves a snack for lunch. I ate at a salad place and got a yogurt parfait and it took about 15 minutes for the guy to make it. Really...it was slow! By this time we were starting to get a little homesick for our kids and husbands. I know...pathetic that it had only been a day. We would see other children with their fathers and wonder what our husbands were doing with our children at home. (As part of our instructions we were not allowed to call home to check in on the kids). We took Trax down to the Gateway and shopped around and browsed the sidewalk chalk art festival again. We were running out of things to do while waiting for our movie to start. We totally hit a wall around 1:30pm. We stopped for some ice cream to help boost our energy level and had fun chatting. We went and watched "What to expect when you're expecting" and laughed pretty hard. After that we slowed walked back to our hotel to pick up our flowers and head home for the night. We had a heck of a time transporting them all home. Since Susan was driving I ended up holding all the flowers. I couldn't see anything but flowers. Too funny! It was such an awesome weekend and I completely enjoyed every minute of it! I'm so grateful that my husband was so thoughtful and sweet to come up with something like this for me! I loved it! Can't wait to do it again! :)
