Kid-free!! For the first time since we had kids!!

THANK YOU a billion times to Ben's parents, who agreed to watch our special snowflakes overnight so Ben and I could attend the National Communication Association conference in Chicago last week.

Scheduling is always a random crapshoot at the conference-- which is really big-- and in years past, I have been stuck with a presentation on, like, Wednesday morning and anther one on Sunday afternoon or something terrible, making my attendance dodgy at best. This year, though, the scheduling gods smiled upon me, and my panels were only like 22 hours apart, making NCA an ideal kid-free getaway.

We stayed in my favorite hotel in the world, the Palmer House, and when we checked in, they offered us a suite instead of a regular room. We were like, eh, whatever, and we expected a typical hotel room with maybe an extra sink and a sitting area, but when we opened the door to our room, we found an 1100-square-foot, 2-bathroom sweet suite.

It was pretty cool.

We died laughing and took a million pictures of ourselves






The conference was spread between the Palmer House and the the Hilton on Michigan Avenue, so we did a lot of waling back and forth and still had time to hit State Street to look at the cute little Macy's windows.

Okay, seriously. WTF is up with my hair? Perfectly brown one minute and ridiculously red the next?

We got all dressed up and went to an adult dinner at a very civilized time of night (even though I wanted to curl up in a cozy hotel bathrobe -- probably FULL OF SCABIES-- and order pizza and a pitcher of martinis and watch a not-quite-out-on-DVD movie)

and then we invited some wonderful old friends back to our room and had a delightful time.

The next morning (and this sucks-- even though we had no kids and didn't go to bed until after 1, we still jerked awake at 6:40 on the head), we discovered the one and only downside to our hotel room-- NO COFFEE POT. And even though price was not a consideration the previous night when we were ordering up champagne (insert eye roll here), the $4 banana on the breakfast menu put us off room service entirely. SO we had to GO ALL THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS TO THE LOBBY STARBUCKS. It is sooooooo hard to be us.

Oh and the snowflakes? Had a fantastic time, too.