I know who my friends are

I’m blessed to have the best friends ever. There’s nothing cooler than having people in your life who you’ve known forever and better yet, who’ve known you forever. The best example of this is Beth – we were inseparable as kids – from about 1st grade until 9th grade. And now, even though she lives far away, I talk to her more than I talk to anyone else – it’s the magic of email. I am so thankful for her – for a lot of reasons, but one of which is that I can tell her the things I would be horrified if anyone else knew I even THOUGHT them, and she never judges me. Plus, she makes me laugh.

I’m thankful for ALL my girls from high school – it’s so fun watching the people who you grew up with have babies and get married. Surreal, sometimes, but fun, especially when I think back to our escapades in younger days.

I’m thankful for the wide circle of friends I have – I have the youth group kids who treat me like I’m one of them, and who I can completely let down with.

I have my soccer mom friends – three moms from Abby’s soccer team that knew each other already but who were fun and we hung out on the sidelines laughing and making fun of our children learning to play soccer. We went out to dinner the other night and drank a ton of wine and laughed our asses off – it was so fun. We put the kids back on the same team for fall season because we wanted to hang out again.

My work friends – we made a four square court in the parking lot behind our building and a bunch of us played four square all lunch hour yesterday and laughed and laughed. There's a group of us that hang out quite a bit, and we just went camping two weekends in a row and had the best time.

My fellow adult leaders on the youth group trips – it’s funny how you can meet someone for the first time one day, and a week later, it’s like you’ve known each other forever. All of the adult leaders at camp did a skit where we worked in an ice cream shop and three people came in and ordered shakes, but our blender was broken. So all of the “workers” took marshmallows and bananas and chocolate and chewed them up or melted ice cream in our mouths and spit it all into cups. Then the three “customers” drank the shakes. The kids freaked – they totally did not think they’d actually drink it. I get to see them once a year, sometimes more, but it’s as if no time has passed in between. They’re so much fun.

I have Sally and Nancy and Anita – my three extra moms who are helping me figure out logistics for our wedding – they all live next door to each other and have been friends forever and they take excellent care of me. They’re a perfect example of how friendships can weather a lot of storms and how no matter what happens, you always have your girls – they truly value each other and make time for each other and it’s really cool.

So yeah. I couldn't ask for better people in my life.

I couldn't possibly fit it all into one post

I have had the busiest week and work and maybe like the worst two weeks or so at my job since I started working here. So I haven’t had a lot of time to write, and even though I recently got internet at home, half the time I can’t even muster up the mental energy to get online.

Anyhoo, that’s neither here nor there. I was thinking today about how much I have – like the ridiculous amount of blessings in my life. I have awesome parents who not only love me, but love Chris and especially the girls. A perfect example of this was a few weeks ago when we needed my parents to babysit for us on a Friday night. My mom was like, “sorry, we’re leaving for Breckenridge on Friday afternoon”. So whatever, I started looking for someone else (which is difficult because I’m very picky about who I’ll leave the girls with) and then my mom called me back “Um, your dad was mad that we couldn’t watch the girls on Friday, so he was wondering if we could take them to Breckenridge with us.” Hmmm. Let me think ab- OKAY! So they took them with them, and Chris and I went up there Saturday and we all stayed another night and had a great time.

I was always afraid that because I didn’t get married earlier that my parents would never get the chance to enjoy grandkids or that my kids wouldn’t understand what amazing grandparents I KNEW my parents would be. So having the girls in our lives is a gift all around – of course I love them, in fact, I love them as if they were really mine - and I love them even more because I get to see how happy being grandparents makes my mom and dad. And they’re a gift to my parents, because they love little kids and my mom was just dying for little girls to play with like when I was little and my dad couldn’t wait to read them all of he and I’s favorite books from my childhood. So awesome.

I’m blessed to have Chris – he is the best (future) husband I could have possibly asked for. My mom told me about a conversation she and my dad had with this couple who has been like our grandparents – they’re in their 90s and very crotchety. Anyway, they asked my parents “what makes you think Chris is a good mate for Amber” and my dad said “well, he has a good job, he owns his own house and you can tell that he really loves Amber – he always kisses or hugs her.” Which is true – he’s always affectionate with me, but not in a space-invading way. He tells me he loves me and he does stuff so that I know he does. Like every morning he makes my coffee the way I like it and sits it on the counter in my travel mug so it’s ready when I leave for work. And besides that, we have so much fun together – laughing and talking all the time. It’s true that he’s my best friend, because we talk about everything. I really like being around him – we love each other, but we also totally enjoy each other’s company.

I'm blessed to be friends with my brother now that we're older. He's fun to be around and really funny and gifted and he sends me text messages to tell me he loves me. The age difference was hard when we were younger, but now we're allies in the parental fights and he can hang out at my house with Chris and I and drink a beer and talk. It's so weird to see him grow up, but I'm so glad that I was as old as I was when he was born because I'm able to remember his entire life.

So that's part one - blessings, the family edition.

Sad excuse for an entry

Things I’ve been doing instead of writing on my blog:

Freaking out about the overwhelming task of planning a wedding. Asking myself why we didn’t just go to Vegas. Anyone want to plan my wedding? Ha ha, just kidding. Unless you do, in which case, send me an email.

Visiting Karen and John’s ADORABLE new baby. I imagine they’re probably sick of me by now, because the child has only been alive for a little over a week and I’ve been to visit him 4 or 5 times. They’re just lucky I live 30 minutes from them now instead of 7 (like I used to) or else they’d be REALLY sick of me. I can’t help it – he’s just so precious and they are the cutest parents.

(Along those same lines, I’ve been hit by the surreal feelings of being caught between being an adult and being a kid. On the trips with the youth group to Nebraska and Montana, I especially feel it. I honestly forget that I’m an adult, because the kids treat me like I’m their age. Then I come home and I’m watching my friend have contractions and then holding this little person who we’ve been waiting so long to meet and I realize that I’m not a kid anymore. Or I go up to my parents’ condo in the mountains with Chris and the girls and I realize that the stuff we’ve said for years about me coming here with my kids is suddenly true – my mom and dad are the grandparents now and I’m the parent. SO WEIRD. And also end of ridiculously long parenthetical aside.)

Coming to the realization that in my cell phone, my parents’ number is under “Home” and that now that Chris and I finally got a land line at our house, I have to change it. Even when I had my condo, my parents’ house was still home (seriously, why would I call my condo when I’m the only one living there) – and now, I have a new home. I know, I’m weird, but I just think of stupid stuff like that and it adds to my realization that all these “child to adult” changes just KEEP HAPPENING.

Reading. NERD ALERT. Want to hear something crazy? In the past five weeks, I have read 15 books. That turns out to be 6,554 pages. Between the road trips and the free time and the evenings, I’ve been a reading machine. I’ve read everything from the newest Janet Evanovich, to Jodi Picoult (who I recently discovered and really like) to classics from the high school reading lists (because that’s what happens when you run out of books and have to borrow from teenagers) to the hottest books since Harry Potter (the Twilight series), to my usual murder and intrigue books. Seriously, we’re like at a Level 14 hojillion on the Nerd Threat scale here.

Anyway, that's the lame-ass update. In related news, I also got internet at home (finally) so that I can surf and post in a blocked-by-work-free zone. That means I can maybe post more than oh, say once a month.

In other wedding news, maybe you are the person who wants to come up with a beautiful design for our wedding website. I'm about as good understanding HTML as I am understanding mandarin chinese, but I can do basic stuff. I've looked at various sites and they're just not what I want. So ideas would be welcomed!

Trippin'

So I’m back from trip numero uno. We went to Nebraska to do work on a camp there, which was fine.

What was NOT fine was that the crazy-ass counselors there insisted on treating us like we were part of their camp – which we weren’t. Because we are adults and high school kids, we have no interest in your stupid made up prayers to songs like the Superman theme that you make the 3rd through 5th grade campers sing. Our boys are STARVING after slaving out in the woods over stuff you don’t get to, and so maybe you could make it a little easier for them to get larger portions, instead of telling them no and/or looking like we just asked if you would eat your own arm if we asked for more of something. Gah. They were horrible and if one of them would have said anything to me, I would have flipped on him. Because that’s what Jesus would have done, I’m certain of it.

What else was not fine, you might ask? The MOSQUITOES. Holy crap, I have never seen so many mosquitoes in my life. It wasn’t like “Oh – a mosquito. I will swat you and your nearby brethren and fend you off with bug spray.” It was like “OH MY GOD – THEY ARE ALL OVER YOUR BACK!!!” and then you sprayed the other person like their life depended on it. Oh, and if the spray had any less than 25% DEET in it? The mosquitoes were like “This certainly is a delicious flavor this human has added to their delectable skin”. Freaky ass mosquitoes. By the end of three days we had gone through probably 10 bottles of bug spray and yet we were all covered with bites – I wore jeans the whole time and they bit me through my jeans. I had like 12 bites on my face alone, which, coupled with the eyebrow twitch I developed (DEET poisoning, probably) made me look like Woogie from “There’s Something About Mary”.

A goat bit my finger. I got locked in a gas station bathroom. The humidity was such that standing still in the shade, I was still pouring sweat. The food was so bad that I told the cooks that I was vegetarian so that I didn’t have to eat any of the prison-grade meat they were serving. I am so bruised that it looks like I got in a fight. I kind of did - you should see the other guys - they're now MULCH (see below for explanation). HA!!

And yet? SO MUCH FUN!!! The crappy stuff isn’t actually that crappy, because it’s all part of the adventure. And since everyone is going through it, it turns out to be funny. I learned how to not only run, but fix an industrial wood chipper. I turned dead trees into mulch for three days, along with my trusty sidekick Katie – we had earplugs in and so we got to where we could communicate effectively solely with looks. There was a barn there with assorted animals, including a motherless baby goat who needed to be bottle fed. I fed him and he was SO ADORABLE with his little milk mustache – he would run up to you and wag his tail and want you to pet him and pick him up. It was the adult goat who bit me – I was petting it and it was sweetly licking my hand before it chomped down on my finger, breaking the skin and making me yell (in my head) “Aaaaagggghhhhh!! Goat Cooties!” And the guy who ran the camp was so nice and so patient and so appreciative of all the work that we did, so it totally made up for the jackassery of the counselors. Besides Katie and I’s owning of the chipper, the rest of the group used a log splitter to cut logs, mowed a lot of high grass, dug holes, weed whacked, spread mulch on the trails, carved out steps in the side of the mountain down to a little amphitheater and basically pitched in to do whatever would help the rest of the group. My kids are so awesome.

After we left the camp on Thursday morning, we went west to Sparks, NE where we stayed at Dryland Aquatics. Thankfully, there were many less mosquitoes there. We spent Friday tubing down the Niobrara River on these giant tubes that were like having your own individual raft. We went on the six hour float, and 90 minutes in, it started pouring rain. We were prepared to be miserable for four more hours, but luckily the sun came out and we had the best time for the rest of the day.

I guess it’s hard to impart how amazing these trips are. We just have a great time, and for a week, nothing at home seems to matter. The kids leave their cell phones at home and everyone is focused on what we’re doing. People are always saying how great it is that I give up my vacation time to do this, but really? I’m not giving up anything. Not be a cheeseball, but what I get from going is way better than anyone can imagine. You just have to be there.

Next stop? Montana. I leave Sunday morning.

Oops! Has it been three weeks already?

Heh. *Awkward silence*Um, hello again. I have now become that person who updates my blog once a month, and for that I apologize. Again. *Shuffles feet*.

I can't say though that I'll be any better this month, and here's why. Chris and I get a week to ourselves starting tomorrow, and then the deluge of STUFF! TO! DO! happens. Pretty much Chris' entire family is coming out to stay at our house for a week. That means we will have 6 extra people here in addition to the four of us. Which of course I want his family to visit, but that's just a lot of people in one place for sort of a lot of days.

Then three days after they go home, I leave for Nebraska for our mission trip. Gone for a week, home for a week, leave for Montana and gone for another week.

I just thought I'd let you know so you could, you know, plan your schedule accordingly.

In other news, I fought the rocks and the rocks won. We never did get to moving the rocks for the vegetable garden, but I am consoling myself with the thought that a) I don't have to re-landscape the entire yard THIS YEAR and also b) my first project (our front flower box) looks awesome and so the rocks didn't entirely win.

Guess what? I am REALLY GOOD at the Hannah Montana game on Wii. Chris bought it for Riley, and so I watched her play it on Friday night. Then Saturday I played and secretly? It is totally fun. And also secretly, my arms are sore today because of all the flailing with the remote. It's like Dance Dance Revolution with only your arms. And I am apparently completely out of shape.

My totally awesome boss is leaving our company and when he told me, I burst into tears. He was totally not expecting that and wasn't quite sure what to do. Because there's no crying in construction!

Anyway, that's all for now. Nothing interesting really, but you know, I like to let you know I'm still here. Skulking around your blogs and trying to think of something witty to write. Failing dismally, but at least THINKING about it...