Saying goodbye to my best friends

It's hard to leave behind a great group of girlfriends. I am and have always been blessed with pretty awesome girls in my life. The three ladies above have been my best friends since early high school. We laughed together, cried together, played sports together and basically were together all the time. These ladies are my rock. They understand my life and just how different it is and they still love me just the same. It was hard enough to leave them when I moved to Virginia. Now, it is even harder being over 4,000 miles away from them and especially when one is getting married in four days and the other just had her first child not too long ago. I hate feeling like I am missing out on everything, but thankfully I have friends that completely understand. The third picture down is a little table set up I did with the gifts that they each gave me. No surprise that their gifts truly came from the heart with them each giving me a framed picture. I had to make sure that these gifts were properly displayed in our new house. Although I have had to leave these ladies not once but twice in the last three years, they have my back. They have my back and I have theirs. No amount of distance will ever change that.

This amazing lady is Rachel. When I moved to Virginia, believe it or not, I did not make real friends until I had lived there a year. Like I've stated before, I had it all planned out in my head that I would meet Air Force wives right away and that we would be just like Army Wives. No dice. I did, however, get really lucky when I started working at Hallmark. Rachel and I hit it off on the first day of working together. I felt like I had known her my whole life all in just one day of knowing her. It's amazing how that works sometimes. You meet someone and instantly you know them and they know you. Let me just tell you about this girl. She is amazing. She is beautiful, smart, strong, brave and hilarious. She has spent the night with me many times during deployments when I needed a friend to lean on. She has seen me cry and I have seen her cry. We have laughed so hard that we couldn't see straight. We have also eaten at so many different restaurants and tried way too many desserts together. We are foodies at heart! This girl made my experience in Virginia wonderful. The second picture is of the gift she gave me at our last lunch together plus a card that brought me to tears as I read it. She put together some of my favorite candies and three gift cards for the road. I loved it! A true friend knows the way to your stomach and this girl sure knows the way to mine. I am so lucky to have met her and to call her one of my best friends for life.