Last weekend, Rebecca, Catherine and I drove down to New Jersey to visit with some of our friends from the days of [Gordon](http://www.gordon.edu/). Our base of operations was an excellent Comfort Inn in Paramus, NJ. It had a flat screen HDTV, free wireless and wired internet, huge king sized bed, sofa with pull out bed, and a free hot breakfast. It was a very nice place to come back to at the end of the day.

On Saturday, Rebecca went to visit [Jenn](http://www.misspresident.net/), one her good friends and roommates from Gordon. Her primary goal was to help Jenn clean her room. Well, it was more than that, really. It was really more of a full-fledged purging, cleaning and reorganizing in the style of TV’s Clean Sweep. From all reports, the day was a success, and Jenn’s room is a much more serene, organized place.

Catherine and Lucas

While J and R worked away on the room, I took Catherine a few towns over to visit with our friends Bob and Leah, and their boys Lucas and Andrew. Bob was one of my roommates during my senior year at Gordon. This was my first time visiting Bob and Leah’s house, and my first time meeting Andrew, having met Lucas a few years back. We had a great time hanging out at their house, playing, watching TV, eating sausages and hot dogs, walking to the park, taking pictures. I even managed to take a few headshots and portraits for Bob and Leah for business/personal purposes. Hopefully they find them useful. It was great to catch up with Bob and Leah, and while we were there, we also took some time for a teleconference with [Mr. Biggs](http://thebiggspicture.org/), another friend and roommate from college.

Spending the day with Catherine turned out remarkably well. She is rarely away from her momma, and even less rarely does she spend so much time with just me. We were together for about seven hours, and I am really impressed with how well she managed. She played with the boys really well, didn’t fuss too much, and was generally cute and fun for everyone. I definitely think it helped to have two other adults around the whole time, as well as plenty of toys and other kids to distract her.

The Ladies

On Saturday evening, we had dinner with Jenn and Matt at Ruby Tuesday’s at the Garden State Plaza mall. This was probably one of the largest, busiest malls I’ve ever been to, and Matt said that it wasn’t even at its busiest! By that time of day, Catherine was reaching the end of her rope, having taken only a 20 minute nap, but we still managed to have a nice dinner in between Rebecca and I taking turns taking her out for walks.

You can see more photos from our weekend in [the gallery](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/njweekend/).