happy birthday lauri!

so i am behind, like, WAY behind, but my goal tonight is to get caught up starting with lauri's birthday! friendship is one of the best and biggest blessing in my life. there is something especially extra wonderful about my friendship with lauri, i'm certain i knew her before this life! i'm grateful for her love and cherish her friendship, she is a gift to me! we celebrated her birthday a couple of creative thursdays ago with pumpkin pie because lauri loves anything pumpkin. in fact, pumpkins make me think of her! so here's my list of ten things i love about laur - even though i could think of 100...

1. when the phone rings around lunch time, i know it's lauri ready to drop everything and get me out of the house for a bajio salad!2. she has the most beautiful eyes ever - they never need a photoshop touch up, they're just naturally crystaly clear and gorgeous.

3. she is very genuine - what you see is what you get.

4. we have so many inside jokes and spend plenty of time laughing. she can always lift my spirits.

5. her and phil are a blast to vacation with - we have done several now and they have been our favorite vacations by far.

6. she is very self-motivated even though she thinks she's not - she exercises every day!

7. she is an STP (same twenty people!) at church. she has been in more yw and primary presidenies (usually the president) than i can think to count, she just finished her primary program YAY!

8. she is an advocate for her children, they are lucky to have her.9. she adores her husband, he is lucky to have her too.

10. she is a closet singer who dreams of being on broadway with a lovely voice but is afraid to sing in public.

***i love you lauri! happy happy birthday!***

bff lauri

I know I blog a lot about this girl, she is my bff after all! Yesterday was Laur's 35th birthday! We celebrated by going to one of our favorite places, Rumbi and had yummy rice bowls. It really wasn't too different than any other day that we go to lunch, just chatted about this and that but there were presents so I guess that's what sets it apart from the ordinary! While I was writing out her birthday card I was having a hard time expressing how I felt without crossing over the ridiculous & cheesey line. I ended up just writing I LOVE YOU! Even though, that doesn't really say it all. At the end we realized that we never took a picture at Rumbi even though I had stuck the camera in the diaper bag for this purpose. So, when I dropped her off at her house, we had an impromptu self portait. One try and this is what we got! Love this girl...

eight years blessed

So, I did a shoot for Natalie for her 8th birthday and it was the easiest shoot I've ever done! She is so photogenic that we got a ton of great pictures in a short amount of time. Lauri came over on Saturday so we could try to put together an invitation to her baptism and I was thrilled with the results, hopefully Lauri was too! (she was) We had SUCH a hard time choosing our favorites and when it came time to upload which ones she wanted for prints, the list was about 30+ which makes me feel so good. I told her next time I will just take crappier pictures so she doesn't have to make such hard decisions! :) I have to admit though, it was hard for me to see Nat all grown up and getting ready to be baptized. Lauri and I have been friends for just about as long as Nat has been alive. Our very first chat came about because when she brought James over for a play date with Taylor (kindergarteners at the time), newborn Nattie was fussy and she asked politely if I would mind if she nursed the baby on the couch. If she only knew what a nursing house this is, she wouldn't have been nervous to ask! Anyway, I was so glad for that because it forced her to stay and for us to talk and we have been best friends ever since. So I look at Natalie and see an eight year friendship, eight years blessed. It's also strange though to think that it's only been eight years, I feel like I've known her forever though, really I probably have.

aunt laur

So I just have to say that Lauri and her kids have been away in St. George this week and we're so glad they come home today. I don't know how we survived the Idaho fiasco, they're not allowed to leave any more, long term anyway. Ethan doesn't know what's like to live without her because they came to their senses and moved home six weeks or so after he was born and we're lucky that she did because my little boy adores this lady. There is something special about their connection, and I just love it. When we're getting ready to head over to her house all I have to say is "Ethan, do you want to go see Aunt Laur?" and he smiles his goofy big tooth grin and runs for the door. When we pull in the driveway of her house he gets all excited when he sees her come out her door and always has big grins and squeezers for her. It's always comforting to a mother to know that if something were to happen to me, I'm not sure that my baby would even miss me!

Oxygen

I know the words "best friend" have different meaning for everyone, but for me they mean the world. Lauri is the girl for me, I can tell her anything, the line of TMI is very thin which means we talk about everything. She's also the girl that you don't have to have a reason for calling other than you need an adult time out and she's all about giving me my sanity back. We talk a lot about how we know that this kind of relationship is not common place and even people that think they have a best friend, don't have what we have. It's strange to put it into words because it sounds kind of gay, but I have to move pass the homophobia and just say that I love her like one of my own children, seriously. Like she belongs to me, or that we share something only mother/child can share. The kind of love that you adore them for all of their goodness and their faults are in the distant backround. And you want to help them and protect them and nurture them and cheer for them and fight for them, all very motherly feelings. Except, that I don't feel like her mother, not at all, that dynamic is definitely not mother/child like, althought we are always teaching each other things, ways to deal with different people, anxieties and every day chaos. She is just right beside me all the way and I am there for her too. In fact, knowing that she feels about me the way I feel about her has made my self esteem grow, she reminds me that I am worth loving and that I should love myself at least as much as my best friend loves me. I love that if my phone rings somewhere around noon that I know it's Lauri wanting to know if I want to go have a Bajio salad break. I love the comfort of knowing that there is probably nothing in the world that could ever separate us, not to jinx the relationship or anything! She is my oxygen in a world full of poluted chaos...