Getting Out Of Town

So today we decided to try to get something resembling a vacation out of the last 36 hours of our pager-free time. We had to stay in town until my blood draw this morning, but we left for Chicago after church and took advantage of some free childcare (thanks Aunt Michelle and Uncle Bryan) and the opportunity to eat at our favorite restaurant, Roy's. One of the things we miss most about living in a bigger city is the availability of swanky restaurants! When we lived in Phoenix, we celebrated our anniversary nearly every year at Roy's. Our 8th anniversary is on Tuesday, so we celebrated a little early this year. :)
They stopped doing rolls and started having edemame instead. Surprisingly, we both liked it!

Our anniversary tradition is looking through the yearly album that I make. This year I finished just in time and it arrived on Friday so we had it to go through. We added our own little notes here and there and enjoyed looking over the past year together.

The traditional anniversary picture. We look about the same every year... :)

Another weird thing we do is take pictures of the food. This was Brad's veggie sushi... neither of us was brave enough to try the one with the green mush on top.

Best part of the night- chocolate souffle with merlot plus an extra strawberry cheesecake. Yummy!!

So it turned out to be a good day. Tomorrow we're going to try to do a low-key version of the Brookfield Zoo. I still can't really walk around much, but if we plan it right, we'll just visit a few of the areas and I can sit down in between short walks. I'm hoping that won't be pushing it... but we really wanted to try to do something special as a family.

Physically I am doing somewhat better. My hcg was actually down today which was as good as we could have hoped for. The real test will be on Thursday; they assess whether the medicine worked by looking for a 15% decrease between day 4 and day 7. I am very tired a lot of the time and still having quite a bit of pain and nausea, but I was grateful for the first hopeful sign of resolution in 3 weeks. Emotionally, I've been having a pretty hard time, but tonight was actually really fun, and I was glad to see that fun things are still fun, even when something hard is going on. I'll blog about this later when I feel like the words are ready to come. But thanks for all your prayers. I think we will eventually come out on the other side of all this, and hopefully be stronger and better for it.