Weekend Holiday

We spent the weekend at the Society Hill Sheraton in Philly. The hotel was fantastic and is located in the heart of lots of action. It was great to play tourist a bit in our hometown! We definitely plan to make another visit there later in the year.

The highlight and main reason for our getaway was to cheer Chris on as he ran the Broad Street Run (10 mile run) on Sunday. It was the hottest day of the year- actually, it was a record high hitting over 90 degrees. There were 30,000 people that participated in the run and Chris came in 10,117 place with a time to finish of 1:35:43. We are so proud of you for achieving your goal!

There were lots of fun activities for us while we waited for the racers to finish. Julia and Emma participated in the kids' run and each received medals for their achievement. They picked out some hand painted tatoos for themselves, played in the moon bounce and received balloon art from the clown.

The girls loved walking around the city, eating out and Penn's Landing. But, I think their favorite part of the vacation was the swimming pool. We remembered to bring Emma's swim collar and she was a WILD swimmer moving all around in the heated pool. We forgot Julia's noodle but she still did a good job swimming but we will definitely have to remember the swim noodle for the next trip.

Over the weekend Emma made quite a few friends thanks to her winning personality and CIs. At dinner on Sat. night, she flirted with a woman who was deaf - we didn't know this until she started signing to us, but I guess Emma must have known because she was pretty much ready to abandon us for this woman! - and we met another woman who came over to say hi and tell us her granddaughter received a CI in the summer. At the Broad Street Run, Emma met a family with two boys that were both bilateral CI users. The one boy is 7 years old and is second in his class and does not need any speech/language supports at all which is just AMAZING! His younger brother received his CIs at age 1 year and didn't start talking until 3 years old and is doing well, too. It was nice for us to meet another child that was delayed with talking even without motor issues. We don't meet many people that know what Emma's CIs are, so to meet so many people in one weekend that knew about CIs was really cool.

Here are a couple of other photos from our weekend. Overall, it was a much-needed break from our everyday hustle and bustle. Julia kept saying how she didn't want to leave the hotel and I think we all would have loved another night and perhaps a trip on the Duck tour bus - maybe next time!