Three blondes in a basement....

There are few things in life better than a best friend.  They are there to pick you up when you fall, call you out your own crap and generally create amusement at your expense at any given time.  That is what my best friend does for me.  We have been through A LOT in our nearly 20 years of friendship.  We have truly grown up together. Relationships like this are good for several reasons. 
1. it keeps you grounded. 
2. you can always be yourself and have no one to impress.
3. they retain too much information about you to end the friendship....


I can honestly say there are few who know me like my bestie.  She has walked my road of disaster behind me, collecting all the pieces I have left behind while I stumble around in life trying to figure my crap out.  She is much more together than I will even pretend to be.  She always has her i's dotted and t's crossed....while chances are I have not only forgotten a pencil, but the pad to write it on too. She has always been a bit of a clown.  I was always the one to steal the spotlight with my loud, obnoxious need  for attention...she was behind me pulling some sort of prank and getting all the laughs. We worked great as a team in our bar years.  The memories that we have carried with us, still to this day make us laugh.  And perplex us, as to how we actually made it out alive of some very tedious situations. Chances are, I probably showed some one my boobs...lets be honest.


As we have walked the path of mother hood together, our weekends of drinking and partying have been exchanged for scrap booking and shopping. We used to rush to the mall to get new outfits, and stock up on liquor when we came to each others houses. Now we dig out our sweat pants, load up on junk food and hit the craft store.  Never in my life did I really think that this is what we'd become. However, I enjoy the evolution of where we are....and the "girls" just don't rock a low cut shirt the way they used to anyways.


This past weekend, she and her family traveled the distance (ferry and all) to come and visit. We were very overdue for a serious scrap booking session, and frankly I was very excited!  As usual, it didn't take long before the stupidity that follows us, knocked on the door. Literally....


The night that she arrived, I had an upholstery class to attend. She stayed home with our 4 kids, and my girlfriend Elisa and I picked up her husband from a convention. We were about a half hour drive from our house.  On our way home, my cell phone rang, it was her. "We have a serious problem" she says. Now, coming from her, this could be any number of things.  The kids could have caused some sort of mayhem....the house could be on fire....or we could quite simply be out of potato chips. I was really not prepared for the response. "I'm locked in the basement".


Being self employed, I am required to have a lock on my basement playroom door due to health code. Now, I was in a predicament with this request. My children's playroom is on the other side of my salon, and the room has no actual exit. Only the windows. I had to decide which side to put the lock. If I put it on the inside, and my kids locked it and closed the door, I could never get back into the room. If I put it on the outside and you got locked in, you could climb out the window. So, we choose the outside. In the 2 years that the door has had a lock on it, it has only been locked twice....once the last time that she came to visit, by her youngest daughter...and this time, by her oldest. Do you see the irony in this? Now last time, she just crawled out the window (which is ground level) and went through the front door and unlocked it for the rest of us.  This time was a little tricky...


Because she was home alone, she had dead bolted both of my doors.  And because she arrived, after I had left, she had my only house key....in the house...on the other side of the locked door. So, even if she climbed out the window, it would leave ALL of the grownups outside of the house, and my kids locked upstairs and her girls locked downstairs.  Not a good feeling as a parent...but absolutely hilarious as an adult.  Did I mention she and both her girls are blonde? Even funnier.


While on the drive home, she and I discussed possible scenarios as to getting the door open. She attempted to pick the lock with one of my hole punchers....it broke off in the door. She used my hammer to bang the pegs out of the door hinge. It wouldn't open. So when we arrived, her husband, Elisa and I try to find just one window that's unlocked. Turns out, my house is super safe. Great when you're inside of it, not so great when your outside. We found the kitchen window was unlocked. We maneuvered a trunk to below the window and perched a ladder a top of that.  Thankfully, she had access to my scrap booking tools and was able to pass a blade through the window so we could cut the screen.  It's also a good thing her hubby is a chiropractor and not a surgeon as his screen cutting ability needed some work....(which Elisa and I teased him about the entire time he was teetering atop the ladder) Poor guy.


After he managed to get the screen off, he had to inch his way in through the window.  Through the window in my door, I could see the kitten staring up, with a perplexed look on her face.  It was truly hilarious.  I managed to snap a quick pic with him half out the window, and I have to admit that I laugh hysterically every time I look at it.  

This would only happen to her. It's one of those things that you log into your memory bank, to be brought up when we are in the nursing home.  I hope that when the day comes, and I lose my marbles, and have forgotten most of the things in my life, that God allows me to forget the heart break, sadness and loss that I will have endured over my life, and let's me keep my laughter, love and joy I was given.  I hope that our kids put us in the same "home" so we can re-live the ridiculous, stupid, and silly life lessons that we were taught. I hope that I will be able to remember all the laughter, and the things that linger with me and still make me laugh out loud at the most awkward moments. I hope that the day will come, that I will only remember all the amazing things that I have lived. I hope that this vision is burned into my sub conscience so that I may have many hours of laughter yet to come. I hope that when I have lost the ability to remember my own name, I remember my kids, my husband, my friends....but more than anything, I hope that I remember that in moments like this one, I was truly happy. 
Our friendship has stood the test of time so far. It has had it's up's and down's, and shared it's struggles. But there is no one on this earth that can bring me to laughter and make me almost pee my pants the way that she does. And let's face it, after two kids....that is no laughing matter...