five years!

I still tell my man pretty regularly- and it's still completely true- that I can hardly believe that I ever got to marry him in the first place....  let alone that we've had these five years together already.    Such lavish grace from such a Gracious God!

To celebrate our anniversary, we planned a little getaway.  We wanted this weekend to be pretty special and since we've never stayed in anything but a pretty budgetty hotel, we thought this was our chance! We saved for a few months and searched the city over (online) to find a hotel that seemed to be "special" and still doable.  

So, after our super friends arrived Friday afternoon (Thank you soooo much E & K, C & M and ZJ, who took shifts watching our kids), we took off for our first tryst post-kids (Isaiah's turning 3 in 2 weeks!).  Popping up from the subway in a spot of the city where we'd never been, we walked in circles for a minute before we arrived, only to be all the more excited about our weekend destination.  The nice lady at the front desk found our reservations and then a minute or two later kindly turned us away for not having all the right paperwork with us.   (This country is pretty particular about it's paperwork-lots of it, all needing it's own red stamp- and we just didn't have with us (and couldn't get) all that they wanted to see that evening.)  

We thought about just going home but we decided to persevere.... with K3 coming in 3+ months, this really is our last opportunity to be away for probably a year or so...

So we went to dinner (a bit grungy, we'd been hoping to clean up in the room before dinner) and made a call to a local friend who helped us find a hotel that, in the end, did give us a room.  My expectations for our love nest were pretty shot, and so was our budget, as the hotel we ended up in was more expensive and a bit less nice- both painful little blows.  Still the room was unquestionably clean and we were grateful to put our packs down in a place where we wouldn't be up a in a few hours taking our little champ for a potty run.  

The whole weekend was really a joy for us.  And, like a cherry on top, we arrived home Sunday afternoon to hear that our kids did great all weekend.  We are so grateful!

Here's a pic at a local site we went to see.  The architecture looks like the majority of old buildings in this area, but this building is a mosque- built hundreds of years ago for the Muslim minority here.

Our room was thoroughly comfortable, and to bless this pregnant mama's heart, and back, it even had a bathtub!  (Our apartment doesn't.  This was a real treat!)