The Sweet Life

I'm pretty sure we could be perfectly happy living at a hotel. At least I would be perfectly happy, it is so nice to take a break from daily chores and to have a warm breakfast made for you each morning:-)

We stayed at the Embassy Suites on the bay again, pretty much our home away from home when Ken goes to his headquarters.

The hotel is so nice to us and they upgraded us to a Bay View on the executive floor. They also let us check out way late because Ken was still working for the day without any charge. And when we forgot to cancel our reservation for the 2nd week they took care of that too without charging us the cancellation penalty.  Totally sweet!  We love it though because it has two rooms and space for us to spread out.

And room for a brother to play with stuffed animals and cuddle you.

We took a break one day from sightseeing and hung out the hotel and did homework.  The boys knocked out their weeks worth of work in about 5 hours.  Which made me super happy we had taken them out of school the week before Spring Break!  Another reason we were pretty happy we made the decision to also was because Darin's band got all 1's in every category his band competed in at UIL.  Darin missed the competition by coming to CA with us and it was a big debate if we would even go because his band directors were giving him a hard time about missing it.  But, in the end we really felt like our family needed to take a break from reality, re-group, and have fun together.  We were glad it worked out well for his band and for us!

Working hard in the atrium.  During the day people are in conferences or are gone so we pretty much had the whole entire place to ourselves.  Except for the hotel staff, which did I mention they love our kids!  And totally remember us from years before.  One of the ladies who served us breakfast totally remembered my little girls being in strollers and told me how grown-up they have become.  They are also super sweet and will make my kids pancakes even though they had already shut the window and it was our fault because we woke up late.
The best part of staying here has got to be the indoor pool and hot tubs.  It is pretty big for most hotel pools, but they keep it so warm.  This time was the warmest it has ever been, it was like stepping into a bathtub.

I really didn't take many pictures because we were enjoying swimming so much.  Everyday when Ken got off of work we would go swimming with him too.  I think that is the best part about vacation! No responsibilities, chores, or schedules to follow.  We could play together every night!

Ginger would wake-up every morning and ask her Dad if he would take her swimming.  And she would ask me every day like 20 times just to make sure that when Dad got off work if we could go swimming.  She became quite the fish.  She can swim under the water about 8 feet at a time now.  She thoroughly enjoyed swimming in-between our legs.  Or she would have Ken and I use our arms to make a bridge, swimming over one set of arms and under the other.  Actually, all the kids loved that part.  We made lots of really great memories.
After the swimming, our girls would get into their Pj's and totally crash within 2 minutes (see Rose's still wet ponytail:-).  They missed dinner half the nights.  I think nights like that show that we had a pretty awesome day!
The front desk gave Ginger an envelope full of fish food one morning.  She was so happy to feed all the fish! Not quite as happy to share the fish food with her siblings, but she did.  They have about 100 koi in the atrium ponds.