Weekend Getaway

This past weekend was definitely blog-post worthy!!! Last week (and the weeks leading up to it) were insanely busy at work as we were planning a big conference (which was excellent, by the way) which took place from Sunday-Thursday last week. Happily, my parents came to the conference which was an added bonus. On Thursday, David informed me that I had a manicure and pedicure appointment on Friday morning, which I thought was a really nice surprise. Then he showed up halfway through my manicure and handed me a piece of paper with a schedule of spa treatments from the Isrotel Dead Sea Hotel!!!! The kids went to Tel Aviv to spend the weekend with Ducky and Papu in their "hol-tel" and we headed south to the Dead Sea. It was amazing! And I got to play with my new camera (some of these pictures are from that and some are from my phone--wonder if the quality is really that different) which was fun.
We were the youngest people in the hotel by far and also possibly the only non-Russian or French speakers, but we had a great time anyway.
It seems that the kids had fun too--with dessert before dinner and ice cream for lunch and all the chocolate they could ever dream of.
Sadly, we had to say goodbye to Ducky and Papu on Sunday--we hope we didn't wear them out too much and that they will come back again!
Yesterday we had another exciting visitor--Marcia is back in Israel for a couple of weeks so she came over. Simon was at Shaya's house when she got here, so when he came home he burst through the door and ran straight to Marcia to give her the biggest hug. Eli was a little shy at first but warmed up quickly and showed her all the things he has learned how to do like stand on one foot and do somersaults. He also asked her to play "flying bear" with him just like they used to do.
I am now enjoying getting back into a normal routine of actually leaving work at 4 and playing with the kids in the afternoon. Today we went to the country club and while Simon was at Tae Kwon Do, Eli and I played "Wipe Out" in the gymboree while David went to the mall to get us all dinner. After Simon's class, we all ate outside and then went back to the gymboree so the kids could play more. It was getting late, but we timed it well to leave before any major meltdowns happened and everyone had baths, did homework and went to bed without any arguments.