My longtime friend Sarah was out for an impromptu visit last weekend. This trip in particular was a bit more special and unusual than her typical visits, as we are both pregnant right now {and due a day apart!}. While we talk multiple times every day, we hadn’t seen each other yet since finding out {on the same day} that we were both going to be mamas, so it was extra fun to catch up and see each other in person.
We really didn’t do a whole lot during Sarah’s visit – we ended up going to prenatal yoga dressed nearly identically {oops!}, and we enjoyed some delicious restaurants and took a few walks. One of the things I’ve learned is that whenever Sarah comes to Seattle, the weather is going to be miserable, and boy did that hold true.
Going through our pregnancy together has been really exciting – our due dates are a day apart, so we’re experiencing a lot of the same pregnancy symptoms at the same time. But either way, we’re both at the same point in our pregnancy and it’s an incredible experience to go through that with your best friend.
Sarah and I have known each other and been friends since the summer before 6th grade. I moved to Mahtomedi that year and we were in the same swimming lessons class that summer. She was one of my first friends at my new school! Since the days of middle school, our group of friends has changed a little bit, but remained constant at the core.
We endured the challenges and drama of being teenagers and got to grow up together. I am very fortunate for Sarah’s friendship, but also for my whole group of girl friends from high school. Most of us are still really close today. Throughout high school, Sarah and I were on the swim team together {though I was a diver}, we taught swimming lessons at the YMCA and then eventually worked at the golf course together in college.
Graduating from high school and selecting different colleges was the beginning of our long-distance friendship, which has now survived more than 11 years. Sarah was always really good at coming down to visit me in Ames, which was about a 2ish hour drive from her school in St. Peter, Minnesota. We both changed a lot in college and had really different experiences and built whole new networks of friends, but we were able to maintain our close friendship and chat as often as possible.
Summers were the best for us, though, because we saw each other most days, if I recall correctly, particularly when we were working at the golf course together. At some point, I want to say at the golf course, we were introducing ourselves to someone and they decided to combine our names into “Sali” and somehow that stuck.
Moving 1500 miles away from Sarah after graduating from college hasn’t put a damper on our friendship, either! Sarah has come to visit or we’ve met somewhere just about every year since I moved to Seattle. Somehow she keeps coming even though the weather is never nice! Sarah does owe me a big one, though, because while on her way to come visit me in 2010, she ended up meeting the man who is now her husband and baby daddy. They were seated next to each other on the plane and hit it off!
We were each other’s maid of honor in our weddings.
And since then, not much has changed, except for the fact that we’re both preparing to be mamas. While it would still be special to simply be pregnant, it makes it all the more fun to go through it all with my other half of Sali.
Here’s to starting the next chapter of our friendship as mamas…