4 years . 4 friends . 4 seconds

Around two months ago my friends Shelly & Eileen asked if I wanted to go on a road trip to Florida to visit our friend Ashley.  Leaving 3 boys under 5 at home with Daddy sounded a little scary but I figured if Shelly was committing to go 8 months pregnant with her third, I could too. It’s been 4 years since the 4 of us have all spent time together.  Needless to say it took us all of 4 seconds, if that, to get right back to the place we left off.

Eileen, Shelly, Ashley, Sarah

The ride down was SO long…but not long enough. We filled every minute of the 9 hour drive with constant conversation.  Even though Shelly, Eileen  and I see each other fairly often we really never have a chance to have uninterrupted conversation.  Children don’t allow for that. You can imagine how much we had to catch up on. We made it through about a third of the topics we wanted to talk about by the time we arrived.

Seeing Ashley when we pulled up was like seeing the ocean as a child after a long car ride to the beach.  Sweet reunions are the best. It had been exactly a year since I had seen her…too long for me but not long enough to have created distance.

We really only had one full day there but we enjoyed every minute.  Waking up late…Einstein Brothers Bagels for breakfast (the day I started drinking coffee again)…visiting an amazing local farmers’ market…laying out at the pool…taking our time showering and getting ready (can’t remember the last time I enjoyed that luxury)…clothes shopping AND buying (for me…not kids)…and enough good food to make me gain ten pounds.  To top things off, on this trip I moved another item out of the “Never” column. I bought skinny jeans. White ones. We left early the next morning.  Our 36 hour visit was fast but just what I needed to return feeling emotionally and relationally refreshed.

The ride back was even longer than the one down. We had to stop for THREE hours in stand-still traffic behind a terrible accident. The 9 hour trip turned into 12 but conversation never waned and since I knew Joe was doing so well with the boys I never had an anxious thought.

Thanks girls love you so.

Oh, and how could I forget the orange tree? Ashley and Spencer (her precious boyfriend) have an orange tree in their backyard so prolific that it looks fake.  Spencer picked a bunch of oranges for us to take home and the boys & I had so much fun squeezing orange juice the next day.  I snapped a picture just before we drank the last glass.