A night out...sans kiddos...

This weekend my hubby had a work party to go to. I know a lot of people think work parties are a drag but wait until you have 2 little kids and never get out of the house! Suddenly going to a work party sounds like Club Med! The party was being held at the Hyatt so they had rooms available for a reduced rate. We decided to make a night of it and stay at the hotel that way we could both drink and not have to figure out a way to get home safely! My parents agreed to watch the kids and they came up early that Saturday afternoon. We headed off to our party feeling as though we were going on vacation! My husband had the smart idea of swinging by the liquor store and taking our own supply, so we stocked up on Grey Goose, Seagrams, Coke and 7-Up….we were ready for some fun! We got to the hotel, checked in and had some time to relax before getting dressed for the party. We sat in the room and watched TV for a while, since we don’t have TV service at our house we now find TV irresistable. That day they had constant news updates about the earthquake in Chile and the “Tsunami” that was approaching Hawaii. In the typical fear-monger newscaster way they valiantly tried to make a dramatic story out of nothing, we watched expecting at any moment to see Hawaii washed off the face of the earth…LIVE. But no, according to the news the waves got larger but you couldn’t tell on TV. The 45 minutes that we wasted sitting there watching nothing and seeing the “TSUNAMI RUSHING TO ERADICATE HAWAII” headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen only served to remind us that maybe, just maybe, living in an area that doesn’t get TV reception isn’t such a bad thing! But I digress…this post is supposed to be about our evening out…not a commentary on the sensationalism of the news media. So, back to the party…

The party was a Casino Night theme, around the room they had different gambling stations set up. Since I have never been to Vegas or Atlantic City many of the popular games are unknown to me. I played one or two and then we tried out the craps table. Neither one of us knew how to play but the dealer explained the game and we tried it out. I got hooked and spent most of the evening there. By the time they were closing up I felt like I was getting the hang of it. At the beginning of the evening they gave each person $25,000 to play with. I was able to turn that into $100,000 at the craps table. I was feeling pretty proud of myself and was daydreaming about going to Vegas… winning big…being catered to by the management of the casino…being moved to the “high roller” suite…everything comped of course…I was imagining how Peter could quit work and we could travel the world with the kiddos, returning occasionally to attend to our estate… it is amazing that I didn’t just float on up to the ceiling with all my day dreaming. But then they announced the biggest winners, the top winner won over 900,000! All of the sudden I realized my 100,000 wasn’t all that impressive. I still got to gloat though because my dear husband lost about 80,000 playing blackjack! Guess who gets charge of the wallet when we go to Vegas???

They had a buffet there, lots of food. The best was the mashed potato bar…yummy! When you arrived you were given 2 drink tickets, after that it was a cash bar. Fortunately for us we had our own stash upstairs. Periodically Peter would slip upstairs with our glasses and fill ‘em up with the good stuff. Now I had thought that since I’ve been pregnant/nursing for over two years that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate more than a drink or two. It’s just like riding a bike, it all comes back to you! Before long I was back to my old self, standing around sipping on my glass of vodka, enjoying the taste, the smell. And for those of you that say vodka doesn’t smell, you are wrong. It does, it smells….good. I told Peter that taking a whiff of my vodka was like getting a great big bear hug from Grey Goose. The best thing about having a night away from the kids was the flexibility, we could stay up as late as we wanted! And we did…didn’t go to bed till well after 1am…usually at 1am I am getting up to feed the baby or comfort a crying child. I had big plans for sleeping in the next morning but I was wide awake (despite the effects of alcohol) by 7am. I tried to go back to sleep but it wasn’t in the cards. We actually checked out of the hotel before our time was up and headed home to see the babies. We had talked about going to a movie or spending the afternoon together but when the time came we were ready to go home and kiss and cuddle our offspring.

’til next time…