At last...

So, Holly and I have been friends since high school and even met in middle school. We've been accountability partners for about 13 years (we spend a couple hours each week sharing about our lives and keeping each other accountable for our living out our faith in our daily lives). We've been through a lot and God has totally given us parallel lives: we both graduated from college early, got engaged 6 months apart, got married 6 months apart, married into the military, moved out west (CA and AZ), went through both husbands deployments to Iraq (2 weeks apart), got out of the military, moved back to Maryland and both were in the hospital for each other's baby girls being born. So, we thought we'd finished a lot of the hard parts and now could raise our girls together and both be stay at home moms at the same time. Well, I'm sad to report that for the first 15 months of Hope's life, our children were on completely opposite nap schedules and we could NEVER see each other during the day! There were no times between about 9:30am and 4:30pm when one kid wasn't in the process of napping. We had to start meeting for accountability early in the morning before the girls woke up and for a while it was almost the only time we saw each other. It was really hard to be moms at the same time but never be able to do things together because one of them was asleep or because they just can't do the same things (they're a year and half apart in age). However, almost out of the blue, it happened. Hope switched to one nap a day. It seemed like just another fun milestone and we were both kind of nonchalant about it but then we realized OH MY GOSH!!! We can be mom-friends now!!! We can actually play during the day! We can see each other without all kinds of complicated arrangements! I'm SO excited for this new phase! I get my Holly back during daytime hours-not only at night or the crack of dawn. Ahhhh. I'm so thankful for a WONDERFUL friend to add to our daytime playdate repertoire. YAY!!! Here are yesterday's pics from one of our first playdates with Holly and Hope :-)