Friends visit

Well I'm finally coming down off of the huge high of having my best friend and her 2 girls from Arizona visit us last weekend. M. Bates and I have been friends for over 15 years and we've gone through so much together as friends; school, dating, marriage, kids, moving etc... We've weathered so much together and are truly soul sisters. Of course with the distance, we can only talk over the phone or text but even though months separate the time when we see each other, we always pick up like it was just yesterday. We love on each others kids and work in sync with each other. No shows, no hard feelings, no anxiousness, just a jam packed, fun, laughing good time. As much as I absolutely love seeing family and friends and showing them the life that we've created in Texas, it's always sort of hard because this town is fairly small and there isn't a whole lot to do.(especially things that AREN'T in a big city) Of course, with M, I didn't have to worry about that at all because I knew that we'd find things to do and STILL stay up into the wee hours of the morning talking and chatting and solving all of the worlds problems. :} jk And that we did.... while I feel we didn't do a whole lot, we did manage to squeeze in quite a few things in the 4 days they were here and I still have a list of things we didn't get accomplished. Of course whenever we're together, we manage to take a TON of pictures so I am splitting up these posts into a few separate ones so you'll have to check back and see what other fun we had.

One of the things I had to take them to was the George Bush house. It's famous here so we had to make that pit stop.

We also surprised the kids at school and brought and ate lunch with them. They loved showing off their AZ friends to their school friends.
Of course we had to sneak in not 1 but 2 photo shoots. Since Midland is known for it's oil, I took them to the petroleum museum so they could see a few oil rigs. This is me and their oldest daughter. She is just too precious and LOVED being with the kids.
This is their youngest and she is just such a doll. She is pretty tight with her MOm but started warming up to us of course, right before they had to go. Hopefully she'll still remember us this summer when we visit them. The kids just love her to pieces!!


After school one day we took everyone to the duck pond to feed the ducks. It was a whole lot of fun and the ducks just swarmed us. Here is M feeding her friend the duck. I love this picture!! The duck was eating right out of her hand.
And A the duck feeder. They just followed her around everywhere. It was so cute!! The ducks even followed our car after we left.

M's husband is a fireman so of course we had to stop at the fire station. It was so fun and of course we ended up staying there for like 2 hours. It was fun to talk "shop" with the other firemen and get to see the station and the trucks.

This was at one of our pit stops at Bahama Bucks... one of our favorite snow cone/ice-e places.
Bath time!!!
This was movie night. We all sat down and watched Poppers Penguins together. They also got to see J's basketball game, A's indoor soccer game and F's gymnastics practice.

Strong A. See these two are convinced they are getting married so he was just practicing to carry her over the threshold. :}
Do you want some tickets to the gun show??? :}
A. Bates fell in love with A as well. We might just have two sisters fighting over the same man. :}
Snuggles