Surprise!

Last Friday Andrew left a few minutes early for work, saying he wanted to get home a little early.  So I went about life as usual, and was pleasantly surprised when he came home more than 4 hours early!  

Especially since Mary Claire had just had an enormous poop.

He took her from me and said, "You have half an hour to pack something nice for tonight, and something for tomorrow."

Huh?

What was he talking about?  Who was going to watch all the babies?  Where were we going?  WHAT???

Apparently 4 months ago, he arranged for my sister to be in town and my mom to come help so that we could go on a belated 5-year anniversary trip!

I suspected nothing.  He was convinced that I knew, since he had been bringing me my pump every couple of nights to stock the freezer with milk for the babies.  I just thought he was really smart and wanted me to build a stockpile for when the school year starts again...

We headed to adoration at a church on the way, went wine tasting at a couple of wineries, and ended up at a very fancy bed & breakfast (my sister gave us gift cards for Christmas 2 years ago that we still hadn't used!) where we had the absolute fanciest meal I've ever had in my life.  

Think lettuce panacotta.  That fancy.  

Aside from the lettuce custard, it was REALLY delicious.  I even ate raw beef!  Because when your dinner is that fancy, you eat every. single. thing. they serve you!

We brought the camera and then realized we had forgotten the memory card...  So all we could use was Andrew's camera, which didn't *quite* get us completely in a selfie.  But this picture reminded me a lot of this one:




From our honeymoon - you can see that I changed up my hair style a LOT since then.  Oh wait.  Not.

We had a lovely view of some cows, and got uninterrupted sleep (well, sort of...  I think we should have brought the white noise machine!).  And even though I had to wake up in the middle of the night to pump (ohhhh twins...  both kinds!), it was just so lovely to have a giant bed all to ourselves and to be able to get out of bed in a leisurely manner, not having to immediately attend to the needs of a child!

We visited friends on the way back home for Mass and a delicious breakfast, and 57 ounces of breast milk later, returned to an exhausted mother and sister and at least one baby who refused to sleep without nursing... 

I'm amazed that Andrew pulled this off without tipping me off at all!  He reminded me not to expect something like this every year.  My sister says never again unless the kids are all sleeping through the night (Elizabeth was, but she stopped!).  I say the stakes are pretty high for our 10-year anniversary!