like the ya-ya sisterhood, but without the drinking and child abuse

So I sort of sucked it at blogging daily this month.

Stuff I should note for my future self:

• It snowed for the 2nd time of the season this morning. 
• I did pretty well cooking Thanksgiving dinner. It was tasty. Miss A was sick and throwing up much of the day, so she couldn't enjoy it.
• On Friday Miss A was still a little sick, and Haney threw up a couple times.
• On Saturday morning I woke up feeling fine, until I walked downstairs. Then I started to feel sick, but I thought it was because Miss A had made me a bagel and wanted me to eat it and the thought of eating food made by children without my guidance and supervision nauseates me. But it quickly became clear that it was more than the thought-bagel making me ill.
• On Sunday I felt better. We went to church with our best friends, and I struggled to control my ugly crying because they were moving away the next day.
• On Monday our best friends moved away.

So we've had this storybook thing going the last month, especially. My buddy Allison's husband works in a city a couple hours away and stayed there during the week. Jason isn't home until after the kids' bedtime. Our oldest girls are best friends. Haney and her younger daughter are super-close. Our boys all enjoy a brotherly relationship. Allison and I started having dinner together with the kids more and more, almost every day. I started going to their church and really like it, which is saying something because generally speaking I hate church. The girls liked it, then one weekend Jason and the boys came too and they all liked it. Then we started all going together every Sunday, and getting together afterward for lunch and spending all afternoon together. They're people who are kind, and funny, and easy to be around, and our personalities just kind of meshed.

Basically, it was familyriffic. It was like living a sitcom. It was like the Ya-ya Sisterhood, complete with communal clothing for the children, but without the drinking and child abuse. 

It was really hard for me to have them leave. But my friend and her husband are really cute together and they are going to be so happy seeing each other daily, so I guess I can sacrifice my daily dinners with her so her husband can have them instead.

But the last two nights as I've dealt with the suckitude that is dinner time, I've found myself thinking things like, "Why is this so awful? It hasn't been this awful in a long time!" and then I remember that's because we had 7 kids here and in the chaos it was easy to ignore how awful dinner is because my friend was here too.