Fancy Hotel

Six years ago David and I took our kids to a hotel to celebrate our anniversary.  It didn't seem odd to us to do such a thing - celebrate our anniversary WITH our children in tow - but then we didn't have many options and we wanted to "get away," so this seemed like a reasonable solution.  We carefully picked a hotel that offered a suite with two rooms, locking door, free pizza, and a free movie piped into our room.  Perfect!  And it was.  We swam, ordered pizza from room service, put the kids to bed, and watched our free movie.  Despite other people's exclamations of, "You are KILLING me," that night away instantly became one of our favorite memories . . .  and thus began our "Fancy Hotel" tradition.  To be honest, the hotel wasn't that fancy, but that's what we called it to our kids and the name stuck.  And so did the tradition - every year we load up our kids and go to a hotel in the Cities some time during January or February.  It's our fun little get-away right here at home and we all look forward to it every year.  We returned to the original hotel two additional times before trying a water park hotel. We stayed at the water park hotel two years before venturing south this year into the Mall of America area.  And as the tradition has continued, it has slowly but surely evolved into less of a celebration of our marital union and more into a fun weekend for the kids.

This year we even drove separately.  The kids had the day off of school, so we arrived as close to check-in time as we could, and David came after work.  David and I spent Friday night in pool-side chairs placed side-by-side, but facing opposite directions so we could both see a pool (the hotel had two) and make sure no one drowned.  After swimming, we fed four kids in a tiny living area of our suite, making sure the mess was minimal because we'd be sleeping in the same area in a few hours.  We then moved onto refereeing movie negotiations, followed by watching a kid's movie, before tucking everyone in and of course, laying down with a couple of kids because they were afraid.  After all that, we fell into our bed too tired to even watch a movie ourselves (not to mention there were two kids in the bed next to us).  Of course, at some point in the night we heard a loud whisper -  "Dad," "Daaaad" as one of the little ones awoke and couldn't remember where she was.  The next morning, we headed to the pool again followed by cycling 4 kids through the shower to get off the chlorine.  Packed up the amazing amount of stuff we managed to haul out of our home for one night, and headed to the Mall of America to enjoy the amusement park.  The next six hours were spent apart as I trailed two kids and David trailed the other two.  We had a "great" time waiting with them in LONG, s l o w - m o v i n g lines.  About the 5th time I pulled out my little brown paper bag to deal with my crowd-induced anxiety, we decided it was time to go.  But, of course, my cell phone had run out of battery so I couldn't call my husband and finding him was almost impossible.  I think I prayed at this point - literally - that he would show up, and he did.  He was just as stressed as I was (we WOULD NOT recommend the Mall of America on a Saturday for ANY REASON), and therefore, happy to leave.  We drove the 45 minutes home and collapsed.  

When we had a minute alone, I said, "Maybe you'll start taking me away now for our anniversary like Mr. X does."  David replied, "Maybe . . . and maybe next year I'll send you on the fancy-hotel weekend and I'll stay home alone."  "I don't think so," I replied and we laughed because that's really all we could do at that point.