Friends

We're coming up on the halfway point of our stay here, and I can't believe how fast it has gone and how great it has been! When we decided to come all the way to Memphis for school, most of our family thought we were crazy! And it has definitely been tough to be so far away from them. But one of our main reasons for wanting to come here is that we wanted a chance to be our own family, to really stand on our own and create lasting friendships instead of feeling compelled to "go home" every other weekend. I'm very happy to say that we have done exactly that! We have made so many awesome friends here, and I'm so grateful for each one of them. Between playgroups and game nights and our "wives club" at all the basketball and volleyball games and celebrating holidays together and restaurant hopping and a million other things we do, we are so blessed to have great friends!

I was just reflecting on our weekend and realized what a perfect example it was of exactly what we were hoping to find here. On Friday night, we invited our friends Brandi and Robbie over for dessert and games, which was a ton of fun! Then on Saturday we spent a portion of the evening planning our upcoming trip to Atlanta with the Kowallis family! Today we had a special stake conference at the stake center 40 minutes from our house, and of course, we somehow left home without Madison's church bag with all the things to keep her occupied. I was dreading trying to keep her quiet and happy for two hours without all that stuff so we texted our friends Craig and Katie, who lived closer, to see if they could bring anything helpful from home. They had already left, but Katie had some paper in her purse! Lifesaver!!! Madison was very content to draw and play alphabet games! But after about an hour and a half even that wasn't doing it for her; she was starting to get restless and I was out of ideas! Widdisons to the rescue! Our friends Jen and Ryan, who were sitting with us, started playing with Madison and kept her smiling the rest of conference. I even got to listen to a little bit :)

This is just a small sample of how great life is! These wonderful friends and many others have made our time here incredible, and I hope that we can always be part of each others' lives!

Our "SCO posse" at the Eye Ball last year! 

(L-R: Widdisons, Coles, Meyers, Kowallis, us, Kings, Moss, Richardsons, Hughes, Andersons, Pattersons)