Vacation--Day Nine Coming Home

In September of 2000, I had just recently found out I was pregnant with Caroline. I was looking at things online and found an email list for pregnant moms due in May of 2001. I joined the group to get some help and advice on pregnancy.

I had no idea that the list would become a group of very close friends. Granted, when I was pregnant with Caroline there were 30+ members, now there are about 8 of us. For the last almost 9 years, we have been emailing almost every day. These ladies are incredible and I'm often able to tell them things that I can't tell anyone else.

I had my first chance to meet Kristin when Shanna adopted the twins--Kristin was instrumental in putting the birth mom in touch with Shanna and Kydon. That was 4 1/2 years ago. The day we were leaving Pennsylvania I had a chance to meet Aimee. Aimee lives about 2 hours away from the hotel we were staying at in Valley Forge. Originally we thought it was closer so she was going to meet us at the hotel. When we discovered it was really 2 hours we decided to meet in the middle. So, for the first time ever, we drove to a state just to have lunch :) We met Aimee and her family in New Jersey. It was about an hour drive for both of us and then extended our drive home by an hour, but it was worth it to meet someone I've known for so long.

It ws great. Aimee and her family were terrific. She has two girls (one older than Caroline and one Caroline's age) and a boy that is Alex's age. Carter was mad there wasn't a boy his age, but we couldn't do much about that!

After lunch we took a picture of Aimee and IAnd one of our families
(Carter refused to be in the picture because of the boy thing and the husbands were taking the pictures)

Since we were in New Jersey we decided to change our route home and take I-95 though Baltimore and Washington DC. Looking back we might have been better off going back into Pennsylvania, but despite traffic it was a nice drive home. We also had a chance to see the Washington DC Temple.
One of the funniest things said on the trip was a quote from Carter (of course) when we stopped at the temple. We mentioned that we were going to take some pictures and then go to the visitors center. Carter asked if this was a nature center and we said no. He replied "Great--I'm tired of doing Junior Ranger stuff" Obviously we had done enough of that!

We ended up driving all night and arrived home at 5:00 am (we left our hotel at 10:00am the previous day). It was a long drive, but it was so nice to be home! Posting all these pictures just makes me want to go back and do it all again--we had a fabulous time and I would do it again in a heartbeat!