Birthday Weekend Getaway

We celebrated Mike's birthday with a weekend getaway to Tampa and Bradenton.

On Saturday we visited with the Neu Family, our dear friends we met in Japan, who now live in Tampa. The last time we had our girls together, they were all still babies! Even though we spent a good part of the day checking out the Florida Aquarium and catching up on the last two years, it wasn't nearly enough time. Thankfully, we are just a few short hours away from each other now so visiting every once in a while is possible.

Then for Mike's birthday dinner, we went to The Columbia, supposedly the oldest restaurant in Florida, where we enjoyed an awesome meal and a flamengco dancing show. Grace was mesmerized by the dancing and sang along to every "Happy Birthday" that was sung that night. Apparently, almost every single table had a birthday celebrant, and all the waiters had to go around and sing their greeting. Even though we had a birthday celebrant at our table, we were spared the singing because I knew the birthday boy doesn't enjoy that kind of attention. In the end though, I wish I had gone ahead and let them sing because Grace would have gotten such a kick out of it.





Tired from the day at the aquarium. Even though the photo is blurry, this is my favorite picture of the day.


After sleeping in Sunday morning, we traveled down to Bradenton to have lunch with Mike's cousin, Cole, and his sweet daughter, Cora. Grace was so excited to see her 'cousin friend' who she hadn't seen since they played in the snow together back in January when the whole Augustine family was in Ohio celebrating Grandpa Augustine's birthday.

We let the two girls frolic on the beautiful beach for a while before we said our goodbyes and headed back home. Of course, the outlet center in Orlando was calling my name so we couldn't pass it by without stopping in for a couple of hours. It might very well have been my quickest time spent at an outlet mall, but it was lots of fun anyway.

We finally made it home a half hour shy of midnight and I put an exhausted and soundly sleeping Grace straight to bed without even bothering to change her into pajamas. She did wake up to go to the bathroom at one in the morning and sleepily asked me, "Are we still on vacation?" I told her that Daddy didn't have to go back to work for another couple of days, so we were technically still on vacation.

Loving all the time we get to spend with our birthday boy!