Abbie and Lilly

While we were in Kansas City for my parents conference, my mom Abbie and I took a 3 hr drive to Wichita to meet my good friend, Elyse, and her daughter, Lilly at the Wichita Zoo.  Elyse and I worked together when Mark and I lived in Oklahoma, and Elyse gave birth to Lilly the day after we moved to Phoenix.  So Elyse and I were pregnant together the majority of my pregnancy.  Abbie and Lilly are a month and a half apart in age.  (Lilly is older.)

The initial meeting and checking each other out.

It’s funny because Elyse and I are obviously very good friends.  She’s one of my best friends and we’ve kept in touch pretty well since I moved from Enid, over 2.5 years ago.  But I would say Elyse and I have differing views on quite a few things, which, in my opinion, is what makes her fun.  Because we can discuss things, disagree, argue, whatever, but we’re still friends in the end.  I would say that our parenting theories are pretty close though.    Abbie and Lilly have VERY different personalities, which is amazing to me since they’re so young!  I guess I haven’t been around many babies and toddlers, but it was fun to see their different reactions to everything, since they were almost opposite of each other.  But like their moms, they got along really well and I know Abbie just loved Lilly.  Today (a day later) we were at Noodles & Company and Abbie wandered up to some lady eating, and by the time I got to her (about 20 seconds),  Abbie was telling this lady all about her friend Lilly.  And she couldn’t wait to get home and tell her Grandpa all about Lilly. 

Abbie has a stuff rhino that she sleeps with every night and takes everywhere with her, so she was super excited to see the rhino at the zoo.

This hippo was VERY entertaining!  I took bunches of pictures of him and Abbie got a real kick out of him too.  Hippos make funny noises.

Checking out the tigers.  Lilly preferred to view them from a distance while Abbie was completely fearless and ran right up to a tiger on the other side of the glass.   Crazy kid!

Abbie particularly loved the gorillas.  She didn’t want to leave the little statues of them and she loved watching them swing around their enclosure.  She got a little bit freaked out because I was picking her up to put her on a bench right next to the glass and this HUGE gorilla swung down from the ceiling and landed about 2 feet on the other side of the glass from her.  She got really stiff and her heart was racing, but she stood there and watched him.

I think the girls had the most fun playing with each other while we were eating lunch.  They were SO cute together!

It was SO good to see Elyse again, and kind of surreal to see our little girls together.  Elyse and I spent HOURS talking about our babies before they were born and discussing everything under the sun about giving birth and raising kids and all that fun stuff.  And now our girls are 2.5 years old and running around and talking and playing together.  I think we were both just as excited to get our girls together as we were to actually see each other.

The girls had a great time on the tram, and the picture in the middle is my favorite picture of Abbie of the day.

Abbie was teaching Lilly how to sign “I love you”.

The girls also had fun running around the penguin exhibit.

Hugging goodbye.

We had a great time at Wichita with Elyse and Lilly.  It was so good to reconnect with Elyse and to get our little girls together.  I’m not sure there are many things cuter than little girls meeting for the first time.  I’ve heard so much stuff about Lilly from Elyse, so it was fun to meet her.  She’s such a cute and sweet little thing.  I really wish we lived in Enid still so our girls could play together often, and so I could see Elyse too.  Hopefully we’ll get to see each other again before another 2.5 years pass.