Last weekend, I went up North to visit one of my best friends, S, along with my bestie, L, and another very good friend, C. The four of us regularly get together despite our geographical differences and have the best friendship - we always have lots of laughs, share the same history, the same interests and have the same sense of humour.
We always start the visit catching up over lunch with several bottles of Prosecco. Then we move onto cocktails, usually poured by S with enough liqueur in them to fell a giant. In a giggly, slightly sozzled state we stagger upstairs and attempt to get ready for dinner out - queue lots of oohs and ahhs as we don our best clothes/shoes, still sipping on the bubbly/cocktail of choice. With any luck we manage to look half decent before descending on the lucky town of Ashby, although we now know to check L's make up beforehand as one time her normal good judgement went out the window and her eye make up made for some alarming photos - think slightly drag queenish!
We always go out for dinner and more bubbly is drunk, and the evening is filled with non-stop chat and cackling.
After dinner, we may have more lovely cocktails in The Vine, and if we get lucky a few free drinks from some interested males (normally interested in S, but, as part of her entourage, we enjoy the spoils as well!), or go back to S's local where we normally bump into people she knows and our group expands. By this point, L and I hear our bed calling but S and C normally want to continue and we might be persuaded to have another drink in a local dive pub with what they laughingly call a dance floor and where your feet stick to the floor, but we don't care because we're having such a good time together. Any male efforts to join our group are ignored - we're not there to get lucky!
If we're still lasting the distance and are desperate for a dance, there is an establishment in town which is deemed the "nightclub" but L and I don't normally make it there!
Even if we've come back to the house seperately, we stay up until everyone's home and end the night with a nice cuppa and snack of choice - nachos, lunch leftovers, cake etc.
Once we've got our glasses of water we head to our beds, smiling as our heads hit the pillows after another great day/night.
However, this weekend was a much more quieter affair. We still had a lovely lunch and caught up over bottles of bubbly, but S's bubbly was purely non-alcoholic.
This is because she is currently 6 months pregnant and expecting twins, and she looks amazing! How she manages to look so glam with her bump I wish I knew - she was positively glowing. When we arranged to visit, I was trying to come up with something to do as I didn't think she'd be up for a night out. At first, I was thinking about a pampering evening, even wondering if we could hire someone to come and give us massages and stuff (a muscly 6 footer would do!) but then my hairdresser suggested a Baby Shower, a hugely popular American idea that us British are getting into. I suggested it to her bestie, C, and I knew she liked games because on our previous visit, she roped us in to play Bingo, with prizes and everything! So we scoured the internet and ordered a load of stuff to bring.
Suffice to say, she
loved it! We played "Guess The Song" with "baby" in the title, a race to drink a cocktail from a baby's bottle (S didn't take part in this one!), "pin the pacifier (or dummy in the UK) on the baby", Baby Bingo and "guess the baby food" taste test! We had a scream, accompanied by many refills of bubbly for us!
Then S surprised us all on insisting we still go out for dinner - there was no stopping this Yummy Mummy! She even wore heels higher than mine, I don't know how she does it. We impressed ourselves by staying out past midnight, had a lovely meal and a cocktail in The Vine, then she drove us home.
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| Delicious baked Camembert |
Less drunk and giggly than usual when we returned home, we managed not to wake up her DH and DD, and, as my head hit the pillow, there was still a smile on my face, just not a drunken one!
It showed, that when we girls get together we have a blast, even when one of us is expecting!
