good morning and happy tuesday! it’s taken me a full day to recover and i’m checking in here with my second cup of coffee before 7am and y’all i’m t i r e d!
zach and i had the chance to head to chicago for the weekend for our first few days away from the kids since before the girls were born!!! it was WAY overdue and goodness gracious, we had SO much fun. meanwhile, the kids were living their best life, havin a sleepover weekend with grandma and grandpa!
a little recap comin atcha…

friday

friday after work, my dad {grandpa} picked all 3 kids up to head down to their house for the weekend. we are SO blessed to have 3 sets of grandparents who love our kids more than we could ever imagine. they’ve made it so easy for us to just drop the kids off for a whole weekend and they spoil them like crazy. the girls have been asking lately for a sleepover at grandma + grandpa’s so they can play in the jump house, so they were pleased as pie to be heading down for the weekend!

we got a pretty late start on the road but sang our hearts out until we checked into the hotel around midnight. we called it a night quickly, getting ready for a busy day on saturday!

saturday

saturday morning, we were up and at em about 7 + i pumped before we grabbed a quick breakfast down in the hotel lobby. i had surprised zach with plans for the weekend and couldn’t wait for our reservation at 930 for SKYDIVING! indoor skydiving that is and we had so. much. fuuuun! skydiving has been on zach’s bucket list and while i can’t get myself to stomach actually jumping out of a plane, the indoor option didn’t seem as dangerous. this indoor ifly place was recommended by our sister in law and it was way more fun than i anticipated. you go through a little training + demonstration, suit up and then jump into the biggest wind chamber in the world {that’s probably not true, but it’s huge!}. my heart was about out of my chest, but i was the first up!

i literally couldn’t stop laughing the entire time and my tush is soooore. they weren’t kidding when they said this is a sport, not a ride. phew! for our second ‘flight’ our instructor took us up high for some fun and again, i couldn’t stop laughing. i do it on roller coasters, too… so much drool and spit all over this one, but seriously we had the time of our lives! supposedly they’re coming to cincinnati and better believe we’ll be hitting it up as soon as it gets here!

next up on the list, bloody mary’s and so much laughing… i can’t remember the last time we sat and did nothing but laugh and it was so good for the soul. we wouldn’t change our day to days for anything in the world, we love our babes more than i could ever put into words, but it’s so nice to revisit why we fell in love in the first place. we don’t do it enough but we’re finally getting back to ‘dating’ each other!

the whole reason we wound up in chicago… a beautiful celebration for this gorgeous mama to be!! the balsan girls {amanda, jaci – mama to be! + christine – my sister} and mama balsan {not pictured} put on an amazing shower for this beautiful pregnant mama…and pregnant with twin girls!! SO much fun and who would have thought, my sister + brother in laws will only have twin nieces now on either side. it was giving me all the feels! can’t wait to meet those sweet girls!

the rest of our day consisted of stuffing our face with lou malnatti’s deep dish pizza {a chicago fav}, frost’s gelato and then we broke out at a game room without any trouble. these old folks were in bed by 11pm and ready for a good night’s sleep.

sunday

we slept in sunday until about 7 and i honestly can’t remember the last time i got 8 hours of sleep in a night!! woooo! i was so excited to check out buttermilk… a local restaurant that had ‘joanna’ written all over it if you know what i’m sayin… thank god we don’t have one of those in dayton or we’d be there at least weekly. delicious coffee and can we talk about those serving sizes. we actually just finished leftovers for dinner last night and trust me, they were just as good!

we hopped on the road from there to get home to our babes…these sweet cheeks that we missed SO much! my dad helped me to edit this pic and it’s one of my favs!!

the kids had the best weekend with grandma and grandpa, but we were so glad to have them home. i always love seeing the pictures they snap over the weekend… these goof balls. we’re SO lucky to have the family we do in our lives and couldn’t be more thankful they had such a good time while we were gone!