an overnight staycation

We're in the middle of house renovations at the moment. I can't wait for them to be over, my life depends on a clean and tidy home and I feel like it's been neither of those two things for about two months now! We got our inside walls sprayed with insulation yesterday and were advised to stay out of our home for 24 hours because of the fumes.

So Baba booked a hotel downtown through 'name your own price' on priceline.com - just $100 for a lovely hotel just a few minutes walk from the Parliament buildings. It was so nice. And Lilah, I can't even tell you how excited she was - she absolutely LOVES hotels and holidays!

She and I decided to take the bus down to the hotel for some extra excitement, it was Lilah's first time on the city bus and she was absolutely ecstatic about it. We got to the hotel around noon, dropped our few items into the room and walked over to the Rideau Center for some shopping. I'd packed some sandwiches and a little lunch for us and we eat it along the way - Lilah loves picnics. I found out a new thing she loves to do on this trip too...jump on the bed! Baba joined us after work and we went out to Lapointe for some delicious fish. We had such a nice time and it really felt like a break from our normal routine.

Today we got a little shake up. Our city felt a magnitude 5.0 earthquake that hit a little settlement in Quebec just 30 miles away from where we live. Lilah and I were just home from the hotel about an hour, we were on the third level (of our 100 year old semi-detatched house) and I honestly thought the house was going to fall down. If we weren't in the middle of renovations/construction I probably wouldn't have thought that, but we are and it was my first thought. I grabbed Lilah and ran like the wind down those two flights of stairs to the street. Seemed like everyone else in our neighbourhood had the same idea.

[ the full photo set is here ]