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.

It was just fun.

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.

Jeremy and I first met when we were about Little Bit's age (around 17 months old,) and my mom always likes to tell people that he bit me in the nursery at church the first time we met.  What a way to start a friendship huh?!  But the truth is that it must have been, because he was one of my very best friends for as long as I could remember.  We grew up in church together and had the same group of friends all the way through.  A rare group of friends who all loved and respected one another, and still do today.  The kind of friends you know that you were blessed to have had then, and the kind who you know made you into a better person now.  We were all those kind of friends.  We went to one another's weddings, and these days, life and time has spread us all across not just the country, but even the globe.

I got emotional when we left our sweet friends at Polebridge on Saturday....after adventures in the outdoors, and kids playing together, and meals shared, and late nights talking about faith and life and everything in between.  And I've been thinking the past few days about friends like that. About how rare and treasured and few they are.  Friends who have known you before you even really knew yourself...and who are still around...who have grown into the people you always knew they could and probably would be.  The kind who still top your list of people you admire in life.  

To have known a person since I was younger than my own children, and to share time with the families God has blessed us each with, and for each one of us all to feel even more richly blessed in our lives because of our time all together...it's rare.  And that rarity isn't the least bit lost on me.

So... despite the insanity that greeted us on our doorstep when we returned home, I choose to still feel overwhelmed not by the chaos of daily life...but rather overwhelmed by the blessings of a full life, and some of the same treasured friends still swirling around in it.  Jeremy, LB, and kiddos... I love you guys.  It was time well spent and my heart is fuller now because of it.

LB has a blog where she writes about life in Montana, and specifically gardening in the harsh Montana climate.  You can check that out HERE if you're interested.