Goodbye to Mandy

First off, I have to give a shout-out to Jennifer for finding my new template for me! HOLLA! I love it. I'll get around to adding the links back in...uh, whenever.

Today Mandy came to visit me one last time before she embarks on her great Mexican adventure. As she told me, she's leaving on Monday for Colorado to go through a training program for three weeks, then she'll be back for a brief time and then she's headed south of the border for two years. But her brief layover back home will probably be very busy with last minute arrangements and business, so it was a good call to get together today.

We had a good day--started off by playing a little tennis, always fun! We both discovered fairly quickly that we were a tad rusty (like, we wouldn't want to take Katie on or anything like that!!), but after a little mini-tennis warm-up, our strokes were looking pretty much back to normal and we had some good rallies going on. After that we went to get Ben and rented Little Miss Sunshine...VERY funny movie if you can overlook the f-bomb being dropped like oh, every two minutes. Hilarious, though. And then after we picked up Patrick we packed a picnic and took the kids to the park to eat and play in the gorgeous weather.














Patrick with his "Aunt Mandy". He so did not get the whole leaving for two years thing, and it makes me sad that he won't see her for that long. She's been around since day one for him. We gave him the camera and told him to shoot away. It was an interesting experience and I hope that by me grouping all the pictures together, you'll fail to notice that he could not manage to get one good shot of us. But hey, this is no makeup, after playing tennis and lounging all day. What can we expect?


















I've known Mandy since college and she's been my classmate, my roommate, my partner in crime, my maid of honor, my confidant, my husband's informant, and my dear friend. Even though we don't get to hang out all too often these days, she's always been nearby just in case. I'll miss her so much while she's in Mexico, but I think what she's doing is really neat, and I'm glad she's following her dreams. And as she said, we'll always have the blog!