Coming back to Charlotte is always a whirlwind of activity — even when I think I might be bored, there’s always something to do.
As soon as my plane landed on Monday morning, Mom and Katie whisked me away to the mother-daughter lunch where, after three engagements in 2008, all seven daughters involved are now either married or soon-to-be. Not surprisingly, a lot of the talk centered around weddings and planning. After lunch, Mom and Katie and I headed out to do some wedding dress shopping. I was wary about David’s Bridal, but that’s where we decided to start since Katie had a good experience there four years ago. As luck would have it, I was the same way — I only tried on 8 dresses, and I bought the 4th dress I put on. We were in the store for an hour and a half and had it all to ourselves, so I made sure to do plenty of twirling in front of the mirrors. I took photos, but obviously I won’t post them here so Jose can’t see (even though it sort of kills me that I can’t show him the dress, since I’m so excited about it). Anyway. Dress = done. It only needs minor alterations, mainly because my top is a size smaller than my bottom and I don’t see that changing anytime soon since it’s been that way for, oh, forever. It’ll get shipped to Charlotte, and my mom will send it along to me, probably sometime in February. Awesomeness.
Last night I met up with my old high school friends for dinner and chatting. We had the whole restaurant to ourselves, which was perfect because we tend to be a little loud and boisterous. 😉 We headed over to Cayce’s house afterwards, which was much better than in past years when we’ve just gone to a coffee shop and thus been kicked out when they closed. It was odd to be back in Cayce’s house — we hung out there all the time in high school, but I hadn’t been there in probably 10 years. It was fun to see them all and meet baby Ellie for the first time.
Today was quieter. I ran a few errands with Katie and Joel, spent a couple hours wrapping presents (seriously, every year my mom says she doesn’t have much this year, and every year the tree literally overflows with presents), and then had a big family dinner. Afterwards, we each unwrapped one present — a tradition we’ve done for as long as I can remember. Joel opened a present from Katie, a game called Bananagrams. It’s sort of like Scrabble, except everyone makes their own crossword puzzle-type layout with the letters they draw. When one person runs out of letters, everyone has to draw another one. This continues until there are no more letters to draw, and then the first person who can use up all their letters wins. It was a lot of fun, and with the way my family plays, it immediately led to lots of cries of “that’s not a word!”, “I challenge that!,” and “look it up in the dictionary!” followed by lots of laughing and calling each other a rotten banana.
Yeah, I like my family.
