Babymoon 2016

After scheduling my last perinatal appointment purposefully before our Babymoon to ensure everything looked good pregnancy-wise, we headed out that Wednesday to Chicago to enjoy some down time for just Aaron and I to relax in our favorite city.  Aaron was heading to Chicago for his annual work conference so it worked out well that I tagged along and extended the trip thru the weekend while Annie got to enjoy some time with her Grandparents.

 

Wednesday was a long travel day; we dropped Annie off in Waterloo, got her all settled in and then continue our trip to Chicago from there, so we didn’t end up arriving to our hotel until 8:30 pm.  We stayed at Hotel Felix, where we stayed last time.  This hotel is great, it’s situated perfectly on the northern end and a few blocks off from Michigan Ave, which is the better end in my opinion for shopping and dining.  It has self-park right across the street (aka saving a net of $15/night in valet parking), it’s clean and has a nice restaurant/bar access attached.   The rooms aren’t huge but they are big enough.  And the best part this time around was the super deal I got.  I had Expedia points I cashed in that gave me a credit and since this hotel is VIP status with Expedia, it doubled my credit!  That is right my friends, 3 nights in PRIME location downtown Chicago for $37 for our entire stay!!  My saving strategies are outta this world, I kept reminding Aaron to praise me for this savings and he kept reminding me that I’d likely just offset it in my shopping.  

Price breakdown: Room price: $322.59/ 3 nights

19,991 Points Used: -$285.68

Total trip after taxes: $36.91

I thought the 'do not disturb' signs were comical 

Nice touch Hotel Felix!  This was a really nice complementary leather luggage tag and truffles sitting on the bed when we arrived and a free drink ticket that went unfortunately unused. 

Wednesday night we headed off to Eataly, which fun fact, Mario Batali co-owns.  This place is really neat, its 2 stories made up of restaurants, markets and food/beverage counters.  Tons of dry pastas, sauces, wines, cheese/meat counters, fresh fish, coffees, a bakery, drip coffee/espresso bars, wine tasting counters, Nutella custom order crepe station (what!?!), chocolates, etc!  This place is packed with so much goodness everywhere!  The original plan was to eat at La Pizza La Pasta but we kinda screwed up and ended up eating at some counter that we thought was La Pizza La Pasta but then found later wasn’t.  Which was a bummer because I ended up with deep fried pizza, which isn’t my thing at all instead of La Pizza La Pasta’s fire grilled oven pizza, which is my jam.  But anyways, we got fresh made mozzarella and then a sun dried tomato dip that I did not like at all and wasn’t sure what was in it that I despised so much until Aaron figured out it was mashed up green olives, gag! I hate green olives! 

I wanted a Nutella crepe pretty badly but I was so incredibly full that the intent was to come back later in the trip but never did.  We took 2 different kinds of tiramisu back to the hotel, one in which was amazing and the hazelnut tiramisu not so much, the cake part was dry and I’m wondering if it was because we got the gluten-free version, which has a tendency to be drier than I like.  Aaron got coffee and wine, which I was envious because I had already had my allowed allotment of daily caffeine while pregnant and of course I’m not drinking wine.  The walk to/from Eataly wasn’t far from the hotel, but it was FRIGID!  It was frigid all weekend in fact, the coldest it’s ever been in the years we’ve gone to Chicago.  I forced my coat to zip and was not in the business of looking ‘city cute’ but rather staying as warm as possible all weekend.

Ugg!  Unpasteurized cheese is a no-no in pregnancy, I wish I could have tried them all!

Waiting for our food

Mozzarella and sun dried tomato dip with the those gross green olives in it

Touche!

Fresh dry pasta counter

Deep fat fried pizza 

The bakery

Thursday we headed over to the Disney store, I really wanted to get Annie something since she is super obsessed with Minnie and Mickey and having the mom guilt already, I had to get Baby C a t-shirt even though she does not need any clothes whatsoever, I can’t hardly buy a gift for one kid and not the other even if she isn’t born yet.

Annie would have had a hay day in this Disney store!

After that, I lured Aaron into Tiffany’s.  I only intended on looking but ended up walking out with my Mother’s Day gift and a Push Present (er..birth present), now that was a good start to the day I must say! 

We headed over to Gino’s East for our favorite pizza spot then Aaron had to head back and get ready for his work conference.  I did a little more shopping but the best part of my day was the 2 hours I had pre-booked at a spa.  A much needed prenatal massage and facial, I left feeling more refreshed than I had in months!  And was a good way to get out of the bitter cold.  I finished up shopping at all the places I knew Aaron wouldn’t want to go, which I honestly didn’t have a lot of shopping to even do.  I didn’t need more maternity clothes, I’m not buying any post maternity clothes at this time, Annie has so many clothes she doesn’t even wear half of them and baby C gets to acquire all her clothes in which I’m running out of room to even put those!  Now shoes is another story J.  Annie is so rough with her shoes that I think we are good on shoes for Baby C until we hit that 6 month size, Annie’s shoes are a little rough for hand me downs from that size on but hate to start buying 6+ month shoes this early not knowing how quickly Baby C’s feet may grow.  So... I bought myself a scarf and that was the extent of my weekend shopping for myself. 

Spinach and artichoke dip is the best at Gino's East

Given that we had pizza for lunch, I need to keep my diet in check with my pregnancy so I headed over to a restaurant called Wildfire Steaks Chops & Seafood for a protein packed grilled chicken entrée and it was the best dang chicken I had in a long while!  Aaron had a work dinner with his clients after his conference so it was just dinner for one that night, which I enjoy days to myself like that occasionally.

Wildfire Steaks Chops & Seafood 

Friday we headed over to Meli Café for breakfast.  I ordered blueberry pancakes, which were tasty as my cheat meal for the day but regretted it, I have been having protein heavy breakfasts for the last few months and carbs for breakfast was not a good start for me.   Aaron on the other hand had the mushroom swiss spinach egg breakfast bowl, which was the better choice.

Meli Cafe

Meli Cafe

After breakfast, we both wanted to get our nails done.  Yes, my husband enjoys a good mani/pedi from time to time.  SpaO was right down the street and we had scoped it out the day prior.  I chose to do the manicure/pedicure with the 15 minute add-on massage and Aaron did the mani/pedi with the hour men facial add-on.  They did a really good job!  My 15 minute massage was amazing and Aaron kept admiring how great his pores looked, ha!  I personally don’t like having a spa day with Aaron as I like to sit back, relax and enjoy the quietness; he on the other hand prefers to carry on long (purposeless) conversations with the estheticians.  But I’m a total sucker for a spa day of any kind!

   

SpaO

Loved my gray/brown/purple nails - felt hip!

SpaO

One place I really wanted to go was Restoration Hardware Baby and Child.  We looked it up on map and it was a no-brainer that we couldn’t bear that far of a frigid walk and needed a cab. This RH was like none other I’ve ever been to; it was set up more museum style in an old 4 or 5 story brick building.  It was really, really upscale, even with valet parking out front just for this store.  They had their own restaurant and Aaron and I stood drooling over the food they were bringing out, wishing we would have had lunch there and not at the mediocre bar/grill we had just came from.  They even had a small bakery and an area with a large piano that looked like it was set up for live entertaining on most evenings.  We walked around imagining and dreaming of affording such nice furniture.  We got up to the Baby&Child floor and I was like could you even imagine owning this nice of stuff for Annie?!  It was fun to look around though.

RH Restaurant

RH staged room - this was actually one of the less formal rooms

When we left RH, it was only 2 pm but the cold was too much for me to handle so I told Aaron I can’t do any more walking around and needed to go back to the hotel.  He had more shopping to do so I took a much needed nap while he went to a few more stores.  Later, we got super unmotivated to head back out into the cold but I had dinner reservations already set up at Rosebud on Rush for our Valentine’s Day dinner.  So we bundled up and headed back out for another brutal 6 block walk.  Dinner wasn’t so great, the setting was perfect, very romantic but I didn’t love my chicken marsala and Aaron wasn’t loving his carbonara so we cut dinner pretty short and headed back to the hotel.  We had pre-purchased tickets to the Second City Comedy Club for the 8 pm show that night and Aaron and I were really wondering if we should just waste the tickets and stay in but again choose to head back out and if we just were too tired, we figured we could always leave early. 

Rosebud on Rush 

Rosebud on Rush 

 We LOVE Second City!  Just about every time we are in Chicago, we hit up this Improv Comedy Club.  It’s a guaranteed good time and when the show started, we perked right up and really enjoyed it and were glad we didn’t forgo our tickets.  Best part of our Valentine’s Day date for sure!

Saturday we woke up, hit the French inspired restaurant Troquet, attached to our hotel, which does an amazing breakfast; we ate there twice during our stay.  Then we checked out and headed to do our suburbia shopping that is a tradition when visiting Chicagoland. 

First stop IKEA.  We loaded up, a completely full cart and a pallet at check out.  Most important items on the list were dining room blinds and a console to organize our basement toys.  Then we headed off to Aurora to our favorite outlet mall.  My feet were killing me before we even got there so Aaron and I split up to shop separately to be more efficient, plus it was pretty cold out so being at an outdoor outlet just made me move quickly from store to store, my shopping overall there was pretty short and sweet - I bought nothing and was ready to get on the road back home. 

IKEA Haul 

Overall, we had a really good Babymoon.  We needed a ‘get-away,’ in 2015 we only took a long weekend to Kansas City and took Annie with us and can count on one hand the number of dates nights we had last year.  On top of that, both Aaron and I have had a really crazy busy year at work so we were certainly overdue for this vacay.  Now since we are back from this trip, no more trips slated between now and when Baby C's arrival. 9 weeks to go!

*Disclaimer: my pictures above are terrible quality, I have a super shaky hand and only used my phone camera the entire time... but you get the jist!  And I failed to get any pics of Aaron and I together but had no shortage of food pics... #priorities.