friend in town!

When the dorm parties are over, the late night study groups have nothing left to study, and your college diploma arrives in the mail (because you're too lame to actually go to graduation) a whole new way of life begins. And with it, friendship forming changes. It starts to take years or at least months to really develop relationships with the new people you meet in your all growed up years. Because no longer do you have every evening free to screw around on campus. Or every lunch in a cafeteria where you scan an i.d. to pay for food. Anymore, your bed is not within the same square mile as every other kid you attend school with making the need for a car laughable. No, when you're all growed up you have to go out of your way to meet these new acquaintances for coffee or lunch or even just to do life with them. And of course work and kids and travel get in the way and so it goes that friendships form slowly. 


But in college, it's whip fast. At least it was for us. You live with these people. You don't know anyone. You are all looking for friends. You all are lost on campus. Everyone is the same age. And so it goes that my freshman year, Kate and I - like so many other kids that week - went from strangers to BFFs in under sixty seconds.


This is us meeting and then kissing less than a minute later.

Ok, not really that fast. But close. Those pictures were most def our FIRST weekend at college. We'd known each other all of a week. And then a very short 3 1/2 months later, I decided to leave Mizzou and move back to KC. Leave my lovely roommate all alone in our handicap suite in the brand-new college dorms where we had totally lucked out to live (if you call Ann Raymond luck). And who knew if that friendship that sprung up like a weed had any roots to make it last through Christmas? But fast forward 4 years, we took this picture on my wedding morning. So, we had roots after all. 

You can imagine how crazy it was that this dear, dear friend of mine had last visited me in New Orleans when I was pregnant and had yet to meet my very own daughter who was already a solid year old!  

All that was about to change. Last Thursday a bag was packed, a ticket scanned, a seat filled, a plane flown. And Kate Raymond landed in Kansas City. My girls finally met. Needless to say, they were like two weird peas in a pod.

We spent the weekend by the pool and at The Filling Station and on the floor in our living room catching up on lost time. Two people that each know me oh so well getting to know each other.

(looks like we might have another fire fighter in the family)

Total cherry on top of this weekend sundae, because not only did Annie get to meet Kate, but she got to have dinosaur time with cousin Henry in town from Colorado. Win, win!

Packed with friends and family, the end of the weekend saw Annie looking completely dazed and exhausted.

Seeing friends is always fun. Seeing the kind of friend that makes playing Scrabble as good as going out to a bar is the best.