We're Back to Reality

. . . and it's really good. I got huge smiles and gigantic continuous hugs from the girls upon their arrival home last night, and today was a nice, normal Monday in our world. Jemma is continued silly, happy, and adorable; Annie is somehow even more independent and curious than she was just a week ago. Except for one hellish moment at 5:00 p.m. when Annie decided to strip off her bathing suit and run naked laps around our entire front yard rather than come in the house, a good day.

Girls' Weekend, as usual, was a great time. It was our 7th one (this took at least 12 minutes of conversation to figure out). Since we haven't really learned from our past mistakes, we again stayed up until 2:00 a.m. each night, talking in the living room until we were actually speaking to each other with our eyes shut. And since our internal clocks are set to All Mommy, All The Time, we mostly woke up promptly at 7:00 a.m., sending us into the week on a total 10 hours of sleep for the weekend. (Carrie might be going on about 7 hours, as she was still on baby duty with 5-week-old Anders in her room. We made an exception and let this sweet little boy crash our all-girl gathering.) Being tired is worth it.

Highlights included dinner on the deck at Bostwick Lake Inn, having pedicures on the back porch while drinking pina coladas Saturday afternoon, a lazy pontoon boat ride on Silver Lake, and the extensive, gourmet dinner that we watched being made (and assisted with) on Saturday night. Goat cheese and pesto, homemade hummus and pita chips, shrimp with saffron rice, asparagus straws in phyllo, tenderloin with horseradish cream, and an amazing chocolate tart with lavender cream that Heather paired with my favorite wine of the weekend. Heather, Gina and I got to do one set in our ever-more-demanding sets of push-ups together - a little flashback to Pull practice.

Of course, it's the intangibles of the weekend that make it so special. We got to welcome the newest baby of the group into the world: hold him, smell him, jiggle him up and down and try to smash his paci into his mouth so Carrie could take a shower. We got to help Andrea dream up ideas for her new little one, due in just a few short weeks. We caught up on family dramas, Hope gossip, husbands, kids, books, and travel. It's probably the one weekend of the year when I talk the most and sit down more than any other time, when I feel the most sure of who I can turn to for real answers outside of my own family.

Every year, we come to a moment, usually right before dinner, when we've brought all our favorite foods to the table and we sit down, look around, and realize: Hey. It's Girls' Weekend. We fight about who should have to say the prayer. We hold hands. Someone prays. And when we look up, we're often all crying. We don't even really know why. It's not sad; it's actually, somehow, sacred.

This year, we were at a big, noisy outdoor restaurant on Friday night (and we're not really the pray in public kind of group), and we knew we'd have chef-type people with us on Saturday. So we realized as we were setting out Saturday morning breakfast that it would be our only "real" meal alone together and decided, spur of the moment, that someone should say a short prayer as we stood around the kitchen island. I thought: breakfast, standing up, not holding hands - I'm fine. Andrea prayed. I cried, anyway.