A friendly visit

An old college roommate and one of my bestest friends ever got a fun Christmas present this last year.  A plane ticket to North Dakota in JANUARY!!  Woohoo!  That really should be on everyone's Christmas list.  Especially if you are feeling sad about your winter life experience.  It doesn't get much worse than here I think.  But we aren't talking about winter right now.  We are talking about the fact that I got to hang out with one of my favorites for practically a whole week.
Tanner and I picked her up in Minot on Friday morning and then took her to the mall.  And Cold Stone.  And Jimmy Johns.  And the pet store.  So basically a very cultural experience for her.  It was pretty exciting for us, though!  The next day I dragged her along to a baby shower that friends from our ward threw for me.  So incredibly nice of them!  And it was a nautical theme and so cute and fun. And Kristen is such a good sport to go along with all of it.  She's so incredibly friendly and warm and easy to talk to it wasn't a problem for her to be around a bunch of strangers.  She's awesome like that.  And the shower was awesome too.

Not to mention delicious food.  Amazing veggie trays with blue cheese dip (I am a blue cheese lover) and a dill dip.  Fruit and fruit dip and mini cheesecakes.  And the day before Nikki learned that I am also similar to a 3 year old in that I LOVE sprinkles.  Like a lot.  So she threw these out for me and it was a perfect topping to fruit and dip :) I may or may not have eaten 50-75%  of that bowl.

 

 With homemade lemon salt scrubs as a party favor.  Which Kristen used on my feet because I can't reach them and it was divine. It's so nice having such great and wonderful friends all around!

We spent a lot of time hanging out and sleeping in and talking and not talking and driving around Williston a little.

 This was out visiting Tanner at work.  I was looking at him because he was telling us we needed to get out because we didn't have hard hats on and there was someone important around or something.  Totally ruined our photo op :)

Playing one of our favorite games, hand, foot and belly button.  She lost.  Even though that's not really important.  It's about enjoying the game, right?  We also played another one of our favorites - Mexican Train.  She lost that one too.  Haha.  Tanner won and I don't think he felt bad about it...

 

 Another exciting thing that happened while she was here was we got our shed...finally.  It was supposed to have come 2-3 weeks earlier, but whaddya do.  It's not that significant as far as Kristen's visit was concerned.  But it is significant for us so I'm just going to take a moment and talk about how excited I am about this.  We live in a single wide trailer and that leaves pretty minimal extra space.  The amount of baby paraphernalia that we have accumulated plus all the other stuff we had before,   left even less extra space and it was making us both crazy.  So we ordered a sweet shed with 2 lofts.  It was pretty entertaining watching the guy get it off the truck and into the yard.

Tanner worked really hard after Kristen left and I had to go back to work in getting almost everything out there.  And he's really good and packing and organizing so it was a good job for him.  Yesterday I got to leave work a bit early so we could get the rest of the stuff out there and things organized and cleaned inside.  Our house was a bit chaotic for a moment and I was having all manner of stress about if a child was born before all of that was taken care of.  Still plenty of things on my list to do before he comes, but that was definitely the most significant.  Now we have space for when family comes to visit the wee babe.  It makes my heart so happy.  

Anyway.  Back to the party.  The night before she flew out I drove her back to Minot and we went out to eat at the best possible option, Ebeneezer's and then back to the highlight of the city...the mall (and Coldstone, duh).  

 Then we swam in the heated pool for a little bit and life was good.  It was so much fun having her come up.  Our visits home never leave a lot of just "hanging out" time for anyone.  So it was perfect to talk and talk and rekindle and make more fun memories to add to our list from the last 14 years.  And thanks to her awesome husband for letting her come and being a single daddy to their 3 kiddos for the week.