Friends for Life…

I’m home from Montana.

And let me tell you what a welcome we got… we had to get our car jump-started in the Charlotte airport Sunday night at 11:45pm, got home at almost 2am to a broken upstairs A/C and 83 degrees in all the bedrooms, storms for days that had uprooted a 90ft pine in our backyard and debris everywhere.  I spent the greater part of the day yesterday having to get a new car battery and new tires (the tire part was overdue) and then had to have a heating and air guy come fix the A/C in the afternoon.  Turns out that it had been damaged from a giant tree branch falling on it during the storms while we were gone.  WOW!  All to say…that’s why you didn’t hear from me yesterday.

So, I’m rapidly back in the swing of things and have a bridal lingerie shower to plan for this coming weekend.  Whew…it’ll happen, but I sure do already miss the pace of Montana.

Which brings me to something I’ve been dying to share about our trip.  First I should say that for our entire family, this was our most favorite vacation we’ve ever taken all together.  It was perfect for our kids, gorgeous everywhere, and we spent some really special time with extended family and also some old friends.

The friends part though is what I’ve been thinking about the past few days.

I wish I could find at least one really old picture to share with you.  But they’re old and I’m pretty sure that my mom has the bulk of the ones from when I was a little kid.  When we were in Montana we had the chance to get in a couple days visit with a super old friend of mine and his family who live about 4 hours from where we were staying.  The last time we all saw one another was at my wedding almost 8 years ago.  We’ve kept up… but it’s been a long time, and we’ve never met one another’s kids.

My childhood friend, Jeremy, and his amazing wife LB, came to visit along with their 3 adorable children.  They spent Thursday and Friday nights with us in my aunt’s cabin, and Saturday night they stayed in Polebridge (in the cute cabin I’d featured on the blog the other day nonetheless) since my family had to leave Sunday morning.  We adventured over to the east side of Glacier on Friday and hiked, and ate, and in general had the best time all together.  Our kids got along so well that they were actually crossing into being really annoying, LB and I could have talked for days and still not run out of subjects, and the guys honestly seemed to have an almost identical sense of humor.

Here we all are in the rain before we headed out to Polebridge for part of the day on Saturday.  I’m kinda covering up my Hubs’ head, but do you know how hard it is to get a decent picture with 9 people (5 of which are all ages 5 and under?!)

And here is perhaps one of my favorite pictures from our whole trip…all 5 of our kids together.