Our First Trip as a Family of Five!

I'm rewinding back a little here in this post.  Life has just been too crazy (you don't even want to know everything that has happened in the past couple weeks) and I have to admit that I just hardly have a moment at night to think, much less blog here;)  But we are rewinding back to the beginning of April.  Abby was not even three weeks old, but we took our first family trip with all three kids.  BIG step.  

It wasn't planned in the calendar, but our house went on the market on Wednesday.  By Friday, we had at least 20 showings with a weekend packed full of more showings and the Sunday afternoon five hour open house.  Instead of dodging in and out of the house all weekend while trying to maintain a pristine "showing" condition, we packed the car and headed south to our soon to be new home, the DC area.  

So we packed the car and were on our way by 9 am on Saturday.  We arrived right around lunchtime, parked our car near downtown, packed the stroller, and were set to go.  First, we grabbed lunch at Cosi (oh how I miss having more of these near us, so I'm looking forward to some more Cosi very soon!).  Then, we took in the sights of DC---White House, Smithsonians, and more!  We actually lived in downtown DC right after college so it was nice to be back in familiar grounds.  I used to do my daily runs in the National Mall, spend many weekends taking in sights, and enjoying the beautiful weather!  On top of it all, we happened to be visiting right during the cherry blossom "peak", the best time to be in DC.  

While we were downtown, my dad called to tell me that my sister and he were in DC visiting the cherry blossoms (She lives north of Baltimore so this was a fun trip into DC with visiting Grandpa)!  WHAT?!?!  He didn't even know that we would be in downtown DC (since it was a spur of the moment trip) and we were within less than a mile from one another!  So we quickly found a meeting point and grabbed some dinner with all of us.  What an AMAZING surprise!  

We said our good-byes after dinner so they could head back north and we decided to load up and head to our hotel.  By the time we made it to our hotel, we checked in, grabbed a little snack from the vending machine, and let the kids play before we were ALL in bed around 9!  It's funny how life changes when you have kids---I think that I may have fallen asleep before the boys did.  

Somehow, all five of us slept relatively well (minus Andrew falling out of bed) and survived our first night with all five of us away.  I think that's pretty good for a 4 year old, 2 year old, and 3 week old in one room!

The next day we had saved to do some city touring to help narrow down our rental house search that we would be completing in a couple more weeks.  We spent about three hours driving around trying to get a better feel of towns so we would be fully prepared when we met with our realtors.  We took a few breaks for meals, park time, and feedings.  The kids did great...they were so tired that they even took a little nap!  

So that was our first trip away as a family of five...a little pleasure, a little business...all towards the steps to our new adventure in life!