Washington DC - Day 1

William and I joined Desiree and Aiden for a super fun weekend in Washington, DC!  They boys were the perfect age for all of the sites and history.  They already knew a lot from school and were thirsty to learn more.  Their very favorite thing was talking to the Secret Service guys about their weapons!  And all of the agents were super friendly with answering their questions. 

Since we were going to be in DC on William's actual birthday, he was so excited to have Amazon deliver this awesome Nerf vest as his gift.   This was the second trip that William and I had just the two of us this spring.  He's really a fantastic travel companion - packing his backpack with all the goodies that he needs to entertain himself.  He was busy playing with his toy soldiers while I was doing one last conference call for work from the airport.

 Our flights arrived from Chicago and Kansas City at exactly the same time, and we were off!  We spent our first few hours walking on the Mall to see the monuments.  And then we had a fun dinner at Oyamel that included a cricket taco.   Spoiler alert: no one actually ate it!

 

8th Birthday Party

To celebrate William's 8th birthday, he invited friends to celebrate at Main Event for bowling, laser tag, ropes course and arcade.  Plus some pizza and Yoda cake!  He received a very fantastic surprise with Uncle Ryan coming to his party!  He also was gifted a fidget spinner from a friend.  Honestly those two things met his birthday wishes!

Cub Scout Ranking Ceremony

A "Ranking Up" ceremony has held for the boys to graduate to the next level in Cub Scouts.  William and his classmates went from Wolf Scouts (yellow) to Bear Scouts (light blue).  It was a fun evening, and we celebrated with ice cream cones and watching TV on the floor since we had moved all of our furniture out in anticipation of the next morning's furniture delivery.

Mother's Day

While I spent most of Mother's Day morning flying home from San Francisco, I did get home in time to spend my afternoon with my guys.   They bought me a bunch of herb plants from Home Depot and planted them for me.   It was a great gift!  William also gave me the "magazine" he authored at school.  I was worried he missed this at school this year because he was sick for a few days.  I was a happy mama when he surprised me with it!

Napa

I enjoyed a lovely trip with a group of my Deloitte friends to Napa - my first time there - for my friend Michelle's 29th (well, maybe it was 40th. . .) birthday.  Although it took nearly a day to travel there after flying 4+ hours and driving 2 more, it was a beautiful and relaxing destination.  And I loved traveling with a group of friends who are frequent business travelers.  We didn't have to wait in any lines, and everyone knew how much Starbucks and wine were going to be consumed! We were a very compatible group!

 

We had two full days in Napa before traveling back home on Sunday.   Friday was our all-day Platypus Wine Tour.   I highly recommend this outfit to anyone touring Napa.  They picked us up at our hotel and drove us (in the stretch limo version of a shuttle bus) to four wineries they had selected.  Picking from the hundreds of wineries would be a daunting task, and they did a great job finding a group that represented the variety throughout the valley.   Our four were Silenus, Tudal, Tedeschi and Twomey.  We had a lovely lunch at Tudal and a cheese/cracker tray on the bus.   We were 6 of the 12 participants on our tour, but since we were all staying at the hotel, we did run into the three couples throughout the rest of the weekend.  It was a fun group!  

Saturday was lunch at Oxbow Market and then a little touring on our own.  Laura and I wanted to go to Cakebread, so we took the rest along there.  We didn't have a reservation so we had to wait an hour, which we did across the street at the huge Robert Mondavi compound.