Fun with long-time friends

Nearly every January since 2005, I've gotten together with a small group of friends for dinner and catching up.  Our excuse initially was to celebrate two January birthdays but it's much more than a birthday party.

The group includes Patty, whom I've known since we were like 15 (she's the one I visit down south for General Conferences), Patty's sister Maile, who was my roommate during our early 30s, Lisa whom I've also known since I was a teenager and also Patty & Maile's youngest sister, Kanani.  The group also includes others I've met through these girls:  Heather, Robin and Marie.  I found some pictures of earlier gatherings:

Here's Marie, Lisa, Patty and me back in 2005.  I thought you guys would love to see my old hair.

 Patty and me in 2008.

Not everyone makes it every year but in 2010 we had Heather, Marie, me, Lisa, Maile, Kanani and Patty.  This was the white trash menu year - so many good things to eat! This was also the year that Maile and Patty didn't dress for the occasion. ;)

Here's our group this year.  Kanani was sick but Robin was able to come up from CA to join us which was awesome.  We laughed SO much and it was just the greatest to catch up with everyone.

Our food theme this year was anything pumpkin - which is Patty's favorite thing. I love catching up with these amazing women.  There have been marriages, babies, moves out of state and all sorts of other life changes and yet whenever we get together, it's like no time has passed.  We decided this year we need to add a second gathering in the summer and I hope we're able to do that.  Being with these wonderful women is exactly what I need to start my year off right.

How I spent my Christmas break, part cinque

To wrap up this super fun (if I do say so myself) series, something else I did over my break was receive some very awesome gifts.  Some have already made an appearance on the blog like the key chain from Cindy, new perfume and my key necklace (see part four.)

I got this really cute shirt from my mom (with shopping help from Michelley.) I wore it to the New Year's Eve dance and here's a bad phone shot of me & Leah from the dance.  There's a better picture here on part 3 but I wanted to include this fun pic that I stole off of her FB.  Photo props courtesy of Oh Happy Day.

Speaking of my Michelley, she got me these fabulous earrings.  So pretty...

FYI, I kind of really like trivia.  I have so much useless stuff in my head that one of my friends thought I should have more (and he was so right.)  Love this book.

So, remember when I went to Idaho and went to Bear World?  Well, Nikki and Emily surprised me with this super adorable teddy bear who looks just like the bears we saw there.  They packaged him perfectly in a box with "haaaaaaaay" and holding a sign that said the same thing (say it with your best Southern drawl.)

My dear friend Kim sent me some fun stuff all the way from England, by way of Amazon.  One of the gifts was this:

No, not the car but eyelashes for MY car.  I love my friend even though this is probably the craziest gift I've ever gotten.  I know she wants me to put them on my car but I'm thinking it would be super fun to just surprise someone one day and have them on their car when they least expect it.

So you've all been warned!

How I spent my Christmas break, part vier

I shopped at Tiffany!  But first, a little background...

With the exception of my affection for Coach bags, I'm not a girl who is overly tied to name brand things.  For whatever reason, I got a few name brand gifts this year and it just sort of struck me funny.  They were all from people at the office, because, hello, those people owe me for all of the pain and suffering they put me through all year long (I kid, I kid.)

One day I came into work and found this box on my desk:

Inside was a lovely crystal candle holder from one of the VP's in the office.  A few days later, I got this from one of my beloved bosses:

My favorite perfume!  Thanks to KMZT for letting him know I was running low.  Then I had lunch with my other beloved boss and his wife and got this:

Yep.  The little blue box.  I was kind of excited, to be perfectly honest.  I figured this is my one and only time getting anything from this ridiculously overpriced store, you know?  Well, I untied the ribbon and inside was this:

It's a very pretty key holder that is registered to me so if I were to ever lose my keys, theoretically, some nice person would take them to their neighborhood Tiffany store and then I would miraculously get my keys back.  Of course, they wouldn't keep the key ring for themselves or sell it on eBay or something.

It was a very thoughtful idea and a really cool item to get but I have super cute key chains already.  See?

I've got this little pink/red theme going on plus I have my new favorite "Best Mom" key chain that Cindy gave me for Christmas (yeah...she's pretty dang awesome.)

So the boss and wife gave me the receipt for the key chain in case I wanted to exchange it and I decided to venture into the sort of intimidating Tiffany store for the first time ever last week to check out my options.  I had gone online and thought the key ring cost $125.  Well, I went to the store and they told me it was $175.  (Yes, you read that correctly.)  So I looked around, tried not to be freaked out by how expensive everything was and found this adorable key:

Ever since I read Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen, I've wanted to get myself a key necklace.  Isn't it pretty? I love it so much and it feels more like me than the key ring.  I told them about the exchange and they were fine with it - phew.

How I spent my Christmas break, part tres

I love Christmas break because it means some of my favorite college students are home for the holidays.

Nikki and Emily and I went to Panera for lunch.  (This actually happened just before break but it was close enough to make this post.)

Annie, Nikki, Emily, Sarah and I went to get frozen yogurt.  There's a fun place near us where you get to add your own toppings to whatever yogurt flavor you choose and we love it.  It was so great to hear all about everyone's Christmas presents and all of the rest of the exciting things these darling girls have been up to.

I chaperoned our stake's youth New Year's Eve dance and Nikki and Annie stuck with their tradition of crashing the dance to come visit me. (I look a little tense because Sassy Leah was taking the photo and as much as I love her, she is sort of an, um, interesting photographer lol.)  Sarah came later but we didn't get a picture.  These two adorable girls left this weekend for BYU-I and I miss them already.  I'm counting down the days until Spring Break because I just can't wait until all of my girls are back with me for a few days. (Bridget, you'd better be planning a trip here in April, okay???)

How I spent my Christmas break, part deux

So there's a restaurant chain based in Oregon called Burgerville.  I go every Christmas when I go shopping in Portland with Michelle.  They have a few locations in WA too and besides pretty good burgers, they have awesome milkshakes.  In December, they have these babies as their flavors of the month:

The chocolate peppermint is awesome.  It's basically a chocolate shake with crushed candy cane mixed in and it's amazingly yummy.  My friend Laura and I had talked about making the little over an hour long drive to the nearest location and during my break, we did it.

Don't these look so yummy?  Well, they were - except this location doesn't put enough peppermint candy in theirs.  You gotta mix it all the way through, not just sprinkle on top, if you're making these at home.

Laura went to school with my younger sister so we've known each other forever.  She replaced me as assistant camp director last year and I seriously couldn't have been happier to turn the reins over to her.  She is amazing at it and is always so kind whenever I excitedly offer my opinions on how I did things when I had that calling.  She has never once made me feel bad about my know-it-all-ness and for that I am so grateful. We had the best time talking during our drive and I can't wait until our next adventure.

How I spent my Christmas break, part one

I work for a company that shuts down Christmas Eve through New Year's Day.  It's seriously the best.  This break has been wonderful for a lot of reasons and I'll try to capture some of that here in the good ol' blog, starting with what I did today.

I woke up today feeling kind of crummy.  I have a bit of a cold so I just stayed in bed all morning.  I started getting texts from Leah at about 7 AM.  Here is a bit of our conversation:

I then started getting texts from Emily.

I sat in bed and thought "why not go bring them lunch?" So I jumped in the shower really quickly and with wet hair and my pajamas on, I drove to Taco Bell and got a dozen tacos and then to their high school and waited in the visitor parking lot for the girls to come out.  Leah was first...tacos are her favorite. Can you tell?

Cute Eric came too.  That's Abbie in the middle, Emily on the right.  They were all in pajamas too.  Did you all go to high school in pajamas? I never did.

Leah had to photo bomb the first pic so I took a second one.  Cute cute.

Leah took this one ... I prefer a crunch wrap supreme to a taco...in case you were wondering.

I asked Abbie to take my pic with Leah and this is us checking our teeth.  Because I love Leah so much, I posted this one...nice, huh?

Here's another...thankfully it's a little dark so you can't quite see my super clean face.

Things I'm grateful for:

• that school security didn't come out and arrest me for being on campus with kids in my car
• that I did something spontaneous today despite not being as cute as I could be
• that I have these awesome kids in my life
• that they love being with me as much as I love being with them

Disneyland -- the end (yes, finally.)

Okay, I'm packing way too many pictures into this one but I just didn't feel right making my trip recap take up four different posts.  On our last full day, we first hit Space Mountain again.  So worth any amount of time you have to wait in line - trust me.

We rode a bunch of rides and then went back and changed because we had lunch reservations at the ultra-exclusive Club 33. Michelle had the connection to get us in and it was a total bucket list experience for her.  DeAnne and I read up on the place so we could be properly impressed.  The restaurant has a private entrance in the New Orleans section.  After we were buzzed in, we waited a few minutes before our table was ready.  Michelle was SO excited.

We got to ride the antique French lift upstairs which was very awesome.

For lunch they have an appetizer buffet to start and we had all sorts of yummy things to eat.  We dressed up a little even though everything we read said lunches are more casual.  There were people there in shorts and tennis shoes but we felt like we wanted to dress for our surroundings and we were so glad we did.  The staff all commented on how nice we looked.

After the appetizers, they brought our entree which was a fabulous chateaubriand.  YUM.

After the perfect steak, we finished our meal with a dessert buffet.  I cannot even express to you how full we were by this point but we powered through.  The picture below shows my two favorites - the cheesecake pop at the top of my plate and the Mickey macaroon.  Disneyland's macaroons are the bomb.

Okay, I had to take a picture of the bathroom because hello - have you ever seen a toilet like this???

After lunch, we walked through the restaurant and took some pictures.  Elton John once played this piano.

The place is full of really beautiful artwork - I loved these sketches of Bert & Mary from Mary Poppins.  When we were looking at these, one of the waitresses told us that Dick Van Dyke had been in the restaurant the week before.  Can you even imagine what it would have been like to see Dick Van Dyke there?  I would have died.

This table was in Mary Poppins in the Banks' home.

Here we are after lunch, sickly full but SO happy for the beautiful experience we had.  The meal was SUPER expensive but I loved the opportunity to see this historical place and to help make one of Michelle's dreams come true.

After lunch, DeAnne stayed back at the room while Michelle and I went back to California Adventure.  We rode Tower of Terror again (my fave) as well as the Toy Story ride (loved it!)  We also got to be in the first row of Soarin' over California which I LOVED.  We didn't really smell the oranges though - not sure if they don't do that anymore or what.  When we were walking through the park, we saw Mickey arrive and we ran over so we could get a picture.  I was so happy and used one of the shots for my Christmas Card this year.

We left on Wednesday morning and got this picture in our hotel lobby - seriously beautiful.  I don't know how I will be able to ever stay anywhere else when I go back.

We had brunch at the Storyteller's Cafe and met a bunch of the characters as well as had the greatest french toast with buttermilk syrup EVER.  For whatever reason, I look exhausted in all of these shots.  Don't judge.

The raccoon from my least favorite Disney movie ever - Pochahontas.

And finally - forcing my eyes to be really open, thus having the dreaded crazy eyes.

I had the best time on our trip and I'm so grateful I finally went.  Disneyland really is the happiest place on earth.  I can't wait to go back!