Last month we celebrated Becca’s eighth birthday. The last official thing we did to celebrate was to have a mommy-daughter retreat. The Tuesday after Becca’s birthday’ Becca and I headed to a hotel to spend the night. Becca was so excited and filled her backpack full of activities for us to do together.

We arrived at our hotel around 1pm and had a full schedule until Josh and the kids joined us the next morning sometime after 10 to enjoy the pool for an hour.

 Our first activity was swimming. I usually don’t get to swim with Becca, since I’m usually watching the younger kids. Becca was delighted to have a racing partner.

After swimming, we took advantage of the hot water and both took long hot showers. Then it was on to crafts. During our retreat we started making friendship bracelets and pom-pom animals, I taught Becca how to play Monopoly Deal and Phase 10, and we did face masks.  We had dinner at the hotel – Khmer sweet and sour. This year we finished reading The National Velvet (340 pages) and so we watched the movie (starring Elizabeth Taylor when we was a kid). Becca was thrilled.

In the morning we woke up and had tea in bed while we read the Bible. Then Becca wanted to take another hot shower (ah, the small pleasures of life). We ate our breakfast by the pool. Then we played Phase 10 until the rest of the family arrived.

Every year Becca and I usually have a sleep-over for her birthday, but it has always been when Josh was away and was only during the hours the other kids were in bed. Becca was thrilled to have so much extra time to spend together. She was thrilled that when she woke up in the morning, I was still in bed and not off helping someone else. We had a wonderful time.

My hope is to continue doing this each year and to someday have a yearly Girls’ Retreat with all our girls. I told Becca someday when she’s 35 I hope to still be doing this with her. We’ll give the husbands some extra funds to watch the kids and me and the mamas will go off for a night. 🙂