Stay-cation!

The weekend after Valentine's Day, J and I did a little stay-cation.  For Christmas, J had given me/ us :) a trip to Fredericksburg to do some Hill Country wine tasting.  However, when we realized that it was going to take us over 5 hours to get there, and we were only going to be there for two nights, we decided to postpone a Hill Country trip and instead be vacationers here at home.  While P spent some quality time with Share Share and Papa (a new name courtesy of P himself!), J and I went off to enjoy our city.

FRIDAY:
We spent the afternoon at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.  It was our first time there, and it was very cool (the science teacher in me loved it!)  So many people had told me that I needed to take P, but my selfish science-nerd self wanted to go without my 2 year old so I could take my time exploring.

The dinosaur exhibit was one of my favorites.

As much as I love science, I was NEVER able to teach weather well.  Here I am in the earth science exhibit in the weather section reaffirming my inability to comprehend, let alone teach, weather concepts. :)

Probably one of the coolest exhibits was the gem and mineral displays.  We had to more or less sprint through them because they were closing the area for a private event, but next time I would make sure to get some additional time in there.  God is quite the artist!

Crazy that these are naturally occurring!



A huge geode.

View of downtown from the third floor.

A portrait from the third floor.

Cool sign on the biology floor.

View of the front of the building.

For dinner we went to Sissy's Southern Kitchen.  The food was great.  Our server was TERRIBLE.

 

 Fun pre-dinner drinks.

After dinner we headed over to Times Ten Cellars and enjoyed some wine and some good conversation.

SATURDAY:

We woke up and headed over to Bread Winners to start our day off right.

I, once again, had the banana bread french toast that I enjoyed the last time that we had a date weekend. :)  It was just as good as I remembered.

Then we went and saw Argo, which we LOVED.  I highly recommend it if you have not yet seen it.

J and I were pretty proud of ourselves for seeing the movie that then won best picture. :)

 

 

Then we headed over to the Mansion, which was where we stayed that night.

 Pretty lobby (picture courtesy of their website).

This is what our room looked like (picture courtesy of their website. :))

Vanity.

Bathroom.

Private patio.  

The high was about 59 degrees on Saturday, so we were able to keep our patio doors open and enjoy some fresh air while enjoying some wine and just chatting.

They brought us passion fruit iced tea and some chocolate covered strawberries.  :)

We had to eat them...they were a gift, after all.

 

 

Here we are for another early-bird dinner.  Because it was Valentine's Day weekend, restaurants all over the city were completely booked.  In order to try out some places we wanted to try, we had to go at 5:30.  So we did. :)

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We went to dinner at R + D Kitchen, which we had heard good things about.  It did not disappoint!

Unlike our server from the night before, our waitress on Saturday was awesome!  She even brought us some coconut shrimp sushi on the house so we could try it.

View from our table.

Since we got home so early, we decided to go hang out in the lobby and do some reading by the fire before we headed to the bar.  On our way out, we saw this sign on the door next to ours.  Needless to say, we did not go in the room.

J doing some reading.

My view from my over-sized stuffed chair.

Then we headed across the building to the bar for some live music.

(This was more or less the view from our table.)

The bar was really pretty, and the music was great.  Unfortunately, a fuse blew pretty early on, which meant the band couldn't play, so the evening was cut a little short for us...still fun, though!

SUNDAY:

The next morning we headed to The Grape for Brunch.  They were  named "Best Brunch" by D Magazine last year, so we had to check them out.

A little appetizer. :)

And a nice, light follow up. :)  The food really was great.  I'd love to go back.

Since we couldn't eat any more, we went back to my parents' to pick up P.  He had had quite the weekend of fun, and when we got home for our nap, he was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the changing table while I was trying to get him ready for bed.  Sweet boy. :)

We had such a fun time and are so thankful to have family close by that enjoys being with our child!  We decided that a take-away from the weekend was that we didn't have to devote an entire weekend to hanging out sans the Peanut.  We could just (gasp!) go to a movie every now and then or go out to eat someplace that we've never been...earth-shattering revelations, I know. :)  Hopefully we'll be able to follow-through on some of those ideas!