Thanksgiving in Bali

We packed up the fam and headed to Bali last wednesday to celebrate Thanksgiving with our wonderful friends from the "Burg the Nielsen's. They are, serendipitously enough, working for the State Dept. in Jakarta! (I am actually once again staying with them as I write this trying to get this tooth that will not be mended fixed ughhhhhhhh) We had decided this time instead of a hotel to rent one of the millions of villas we always see for rent. We got a steal of a deal on what was described as a four bedroom with a pool. When we showed up I just about keeled over and died it was so gorgeous! When you walk in the wooden doors we were greeted of course by a gorgeous hindu statue and walked along a rocky path back to the "villa". The first courtyard looked like this:

To the right of this is a building with two large bedrooms each with their own bathrooms. This was were the four boys slept. They got to share a bed, but it was a pretty big bed so I didn't feel too bad ha!

When you stood on their "porch" you faced our outdoor living room/ dinning room:

This was completely surrounded by a "moat" of sorts with couy fish and gorgeous moss covered water features. Sammy LOVED the fish

to the left of the living room was our kitchen, laundry room and office. If you walked through the living room and down the beautiful-yet-heart-attack-inducing-when-you-have-an-18 month-old-walking-around-steps:

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You get to the two master suites. Both free standing with a courtyard in the middle:

Everywhere you looked there were flowers. Even when you went inside your room the beds and side tables had flowers

They even stuck them in between the shampoo and conditioner

I LOVE the smell of gardenia so I was in heaven! If you walked down our porch and around the corner you came to the pool. Cher and I were REALLY nervous about having our own pool, excited, but soooo nervous. I had actually decided to keep Abby in a life jacket the entire time. We were lucky though and it was zero issue. The fact that it was kid of out of the way and you had to walk past a mommy daddy room to get to it made it easy to guard.

We got soooooooo much use out of it. The kids LOVED being in it and we loved playing with them or relaxing on the cabana

We all loved being there so much it took a while for us to even want to go anywhere else. Add into that the fact that directly next to our villa was the hotel restaurant where we got our yummy breakfast every morning and had we wanted to we could have been perfectly happy never leaving it ha! But we did and I have lots of fun pictures of the kids riding mopeds and elephants and playing at the beach. But since Abby is totally getting up at 4:30am (I do not like you jet lag) and it is 10pm I am going to sleep :)