Forever 21?

I had an interesting experience today...

I dropped Jane off at preschool today and headed to the mall with a friend. We walked around with our little kids in umbrella strollers, wearing our staple "mom" outfit of a T-shirt and jeans. The first store we walked into was "Forever 21".

It's such a cute store and every time I walk by I want to go in and browse and buy stuff. Today, though, as I browsed through the purposefully torn leggings and the tops that could potentially be a shirt or a dress I realized that I've outgrown "Forever 21".

It was a very bizarre moment. For a really long time I felt like I was too young to wear the clothes in that store and then--BAM!--before my eyes, I'm too OLD to wear their clothes.

So, I'm officially moving on to Ann Taylor Loft or Gap or (my fave) TJ Maxx. If you see me in "Forever 21" in the future, you can be sure that I'm shopping for accessories--for Jane.

Navigating Jacksonville

Look at those happy smiles on our faces. There is a good reason for all of these grins...
We walked at least six miles looking for this Tropical Smoothie!

Jake and I are both trying to stay fit and healthy so we wanted to get some smoothies with a protein added in for breakfast instead of eating a really greasy and fatty breakfast at a restaurant.

Well......

The concierge at the hotel told us it would be three blocks away in one direction. About a mile and a half later we stopped at another hotel and the guy told us it would be about half a mile in another direction and THEN about a mile and a half later some ladies on the sidewalk told us it was "a ways" up the road in a different direction.

We were so happy when we finally found this store! The smoothies were super yummy and they really helped cool us down on the Loooooooooooong walk back to our hotel.

One bright and shiny side of the story is that we didn't have to buy lunch on Saturday! It was nearly lunch time when we got to the restaurant and the protein additive helped hold us over until our early dinner reservation!

Parents Weekend Out

Jake and I were so amazingly lucky to be able to get out of town for the weekend a couple of days ago. We stayed at the Crown Plaza Riverfront Hotel in Jacksonville, Fl and it was an adventure, to say the least!

The picture above is the view that we had from our room. I was pretty nervous about leaving the kids for TWO nights in a row (because I've only ever been away from them for one night) but they didn't even notice that we were gone. Jake's parents generously spent their weekend at our house so we could creep out of town. Thank you Manga and Pop Pop! We sure do love you!

Jake and I had been planning on taking this trip since February so when I discovered the Groupon website I started checking it every day looking for good deals for our trip. I ended up finding some awesome restaurant Groupon's for our trip so you know we ate well! We did have to drive all over town but it was worth it. Jacksonville is a beautiful city with some AMAZING shopping.

Our first night in Jacksonville we checked into our hotel at about 9:00pm and decided at 10:00 to walk across that beautiful blue bridge over to Jacksonville Landing. Jacksonville Landing has restaurants, shopping, some delightful lights in the trees and live music! The air was balmy and cool. The breeze was light and refreshing. The river was so peaceful and even though we were surrounded by other people it really felt like we were the only two people in Jacksonville that night.