Just Dance, Rice Krispies, and Nail Polish.

I hate Mondays, besides cooked spinach Mondays are probably the thing I hate most in this world. So I decided that I wanted to find something that made Mondays super awesome. Here it is: every Monday I'm going to talk about one of my very special friends that I love dearly. I figured that pairing the terribleness of Mondays with the awesomeness of my great friends would make the world even better (: And the award for first featured friend is....ALYSA!

Alysa and I moved to Guam the same summer. All of seventh grade I was like man I want to be her friend! But of course I was not nearly cool enough to run in the same circles as her, so I suffered to hang with the nerds and wish. (Man that makes me sound really creepy...!) Then came 8th grade, the two of us got assigned to work on the end of the year slide show for "graduation" that year. This meant that we spent lunch together every day working on the show...YES! my wish had come true!! (Also creepy...sorry Lys!) Through this new friendship that we were forming we lost a couple of our other friends, they got extremely jealous of what we had going and thought we were stealing the other from them. So we sufficed to live out the rest of 8th grade just the two of us. 

Ninth grade was a magical year for us. Our little pair expanded into a group of four super close friends. Alysa, Becky, Jordan and I were attached at the hip the entire year. Sleepovers were a weekly occurance and going to bed before 5 am was an oddity. We never seemed to grow tired of each other and time apart killed us. Thankfully our school was small enough that basically all of our classes over lapped and we saw A LOT of each other all the time. My favorite memory of the four of us was after the homecoming dance, at 5 in the morning we all got a sudden craving for jambalaya. So at 5 o'clock in the morning we whipped up a pot of it; this became a tradition that we still practice today. We were fearless as freshman, climbing on roofs to tan, pushing each other down hills in wheel chairs, and discovering the abandoned military base around the corner were some of our favorite pass times. Fun seemed to be all around us and we were really great at finding it. I had never had friends like the three of them before and loved every single second of our time together.

That summer we were all split up. I moved to Virginia, Alysa moved to South Carolina, Becky went back to California and Jordan stayed in Guam. For a while we were really great at all staying in touch. Unfortunately crazy lives and the difference of time zones has now hindered my communication with Becky and Jordan but Alysa and I are close as ever. Every summer since moving we get together and spend a week indulging in our three favorite obsessions: Just Dance (yes, I'm a closet dancer...when I'm awake...), Rice Krispie treats (mostly my obsession, but everyone is nice enough to accommodate it), and nail painting (which Becky and Lys rock at and I just like to pretend I'm good at). Friendship is definitely not something to take for granted, and I will forever be thankful for what we've got. 

I made commitment a while  back that I was going to at least text Alysa once a day, and while I'm not always the most consistent we still talk rather often. Today I decided to call her Alysa the tiger (she recently got accepted to Clemson!!!) and I became Abby the gator, which she promptly told me I was to now sign all my blogs with. So, here goes nothing...thanks for the new moniker Lys the Tiger! <3

xoxo,

Abby the gator