Jay and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary last Tuesday, April 29. Since Jay was working until 8 p.m. that night and it wasn’t like we could just go out and get a drink after he got off work to celebrate, we decided to do something the weekend before it. Jay surprised me by booking a room at the Renaissance Hotel at North Hills so we could have a little mini-staycation/babymoon for a night. I love North Hills and have always wanted to live there. You can see into the rooms at the Renaissance from the treadmills at my gym, haha, so I have also always been curious about staying there. Needless to say, I was thrilled about my one night as a North Hills resident, haha.
We checked in around 6 p.m. and were placed in a room with an awesome view of the mall itself (North Hills is an “upscale” outdoor mall). Perfect for people watching. For dinner, we walked over to a French restaurant called Coquette. I thought the French portion of the menu would be a little intimidating, but it wasn’t at all. In fact, the food was delicious and the service was great. Our waiter was super helpful in making recommendations, even though we both ended up playing it safe and having something steak-related, haha.
We walked around North Hills for a little bit afterwards before returning to our room to regroup. At that point, we were both stuffed and exhausted. I really hate that about being pregnant; getting full and uncomfortable so quickly. I barely slept that night because I was so full and uncomfortable from dinner. It’s so annoying! But, I love being social and didn’t want to totally end the evening at 9 p.m., so I marched us down to the hotel bar so we could at least do something! One scotch (Jay, duh) and one cranberry and soda (me) later, we were ready to admit defeat, lol, and went back to chill and people watch from our room.
I need to gush about how awesome our room was for a minute. There was a TV hidden within the mirror of our bathroom. It. Was. Awesome. Jay had noticed a remote on top of the towel rack when we first got there and during one of my many, many bathroom trips, I got curious and started hitting buttons on it to try and figure out why it was there. All of a sudden, there was talking and an image lit up in the bathroom mirror! It really was super cool. We pretty much kept the TV on in there until we checked out, haha. It helped during my 42 bathroom trips during the night. The other cool thing about our room was the extra jets in the shower. There were two additional jets that were aimed at your mid-section, so you could turn around and get an awesome back massage. That was also a fun discovery.
On Sunday morning, we went for brunch at our new favorite place, Another Broken Egg Cafe. If you have one in your area, should should check it out. There’s another one close to my office, so I had been there before but I took Jay to the new one at North Hills for the first time on Easter. He’s now obsessed and I’m sure we’ll be going back a lot more, haha.
Once we got home, we had to take a short nap. Like I said before, I had eaten too much at dinner the night before and being so full did not help me get a good night’s sleep at all. We finished up the weekend by doing a huge house cleaning, from top-to-bottom. My friend Aimee was driving from Florida to Long Island and stayed with us that night, so Jay grilled us some steaks and we finished the weekend by relaxing and catching up on her crazy stories. It was a great weekend. I can’t wait to live the North Hills life again.
On our actual anniversary, we quietly celebrated with a toast and some homemade ice cream sandwiches after Jay got home from work. As for gifts, we are on a “year-by-year” basis for following the “list”, but this year, we decided to honor the traditional leather and also incorporate the ‘theme’ that whatever we got was something that we could do with our son or was something related to the baby. Jay got me a gorgeous set of leather bound classic books from Barnes & Noble that I can read to him someday. This past Christmas, I got Jay a really nice camera that he wanted so he could take fancy pictures of the baby as he grows up. I thought I would follow that up with a leather photo album that has the baby’s name engraved into it. I know, I know, I should’ve gotten a baseball glove, but when Jay and I each picked one personal effect to put into our safe that we would want to save in case of a fire, Jay picked his photo album filled with pictures from his childhood. I thought he could make one for our son to treasure one day.
Anyway, that was our third anniversary. I can’t believe three years have gone by, and I can’t wait for a million more of them with my best friend and soul mate. 🙂
My gift.
