Vacation Day 1: HS Friend Reunion-A

We planned our vacation in conjunction with 2 awesome things . . . seeing D's bro in Oregon and my High School Friend Reunion! There are about 10 girls (give or take) in our HS group of friends . . . and we decided it was about darn time to get us all together! Well, we tried to. Karey couldn't make it and Celeste, Jennifer, and Heather and recently had tiny little babies. But the rest of us hit the road for a party in Boise!

Packing that morning was not going well, and it's a good thing Darik took that morning off because he spent all morning at the shop getting the brakes replaced. By the time that was done packing was done and we hit the road a little later than hoped. We arrived at Anna's house and had a great time just hanging out while waiting for everyone else to show up. Anna has the perfect house to host the reunion with plenty of extra bedrooms for everyone, as well as an adorable chocolate lab puppy for the kids to play with!

Janna, Audrey, Christina, & Me

Gigi and Skyler -- he LOVES dogs, apparently. And Gigi was really good with all the kids mucking about.

The kiddies playing in one of the extra rooms

We had decided we wanted to all go out to eat dinner and leave all of our kids with a babysitter (collectively there were 11 kids between us. If we'd had all of our friends there the total would be 21!!!) There were 3-4 babysitters there when we dropped them off -- I was a little nervous cuz I knew that many kids are hard to keep track of! All I know is that I was hoping the same # of kids would be there when we came back as when we left. But I quickly forgot about it because we were going on a date night, baby! Dinner at PF Changs included a surprise baby shower for Anna that Tsa threw together for us.
Here is a picture of us waiting for our table. My head is sticking in because I thought the camera was cutting me off! I know I look dumb . . . Anyway we only had to wait 20-30 minutes past our reservation for a table but the manager still gave us free appetizers!!! YUM! and Cha-ching!! It was totally worth the long wait :-)
This is all of us being SO happy because the food was SO delicious and we were having SO much fun!
This is a shot from the other end of the table. For those of you who might know on the left side it's Janna Woodland Herron & Husband; Anna Airmet Eberlin & Husband, and Teresa Johnson Green sitting across from husband. Then on the right its Wendi Buck Simons & Husband; Jill Griffiths Wolfe; and D&I.
We busted out the gifts after we were all stuffed from eating buffet style of tons of different entrees. DJ & Anna are literally going to be the best parents in the world!! Literally Ellie loves them, she still asks sometimes if we can go to their house and play. We are so excited for them.
Anna & DJ being all cute about little cute sporty clothes (DJ is way into sports [he played college baseball and knows a bunch of guys in MLB] and they are having a boy so . . . just perfect!)
Darik & I outside after dinner falling in love with downtown Boise. I think we'd love living there someday!!
All of us posing by the "horse". I am so glad we got together. I learned that babysitting for 3 kids for 1 night is expensive!!! But worth it. All of us were too tired to stay up too late talking, so we went and crashed because the next day was going to be tons of fun . . . stay tuned!