Girls Weekend

Over Labor Day weekend, I spent 2 nights with my girlfriends at my parents' cottage in Birch Bay. It was an informal Bachelorette weekend for Amy, as her wedding was just 2 weeks away. I took an erratic assortment of photos and many are not blog-appropriate (I'm finding that weird dance parties and  wine = unflattering and hard to explain photos). First up is Kristin, who showed up all fancy in her beach dress (if you look closely it's patterned with shells and starfish!).  The rest of us were wearing yoga pants.  

That night we ate tacos in elastic waist pants, watched Dirty Dancing and relived our childhood crushes for Patrick Swayze. The next morning in our pjs, Heidi and I snuggled in the California King bed while Kristin did a weird dance involving fruit and new age jazz. I have enough photos of this dance to put together a flip book, but decided to post just the one.

Most of the rest of the weekend was spent doing varieties of nothing in the backyard. The weather lovely and warm and we read magazines, gossiped, ate BLTs, I french braided everyone's hair (kind of) and we did a few rounds of practice for Amy's wedding hair, which I had volunteered to do.

We walked to the beach (again please note that Kristin looks several shades fancier than 

all the rest of us).

Magazine Club:

We bought several trashy magazines to bring with us, and one copy of Sunset (mostly just to irk Kristin who thinks Sunset is for old ladies).  Lo and behold, there was already a copy of Sunset at the cottage! So Heidi and Amy decided to simultaneously enjoy the magazine, referring eachother to different pages and photos as they went.

Happy hour started early in the backyard with champagne with a little Saint Germaine.

After a few glasses of wine, pink mustaches were put into action.

We decided Darrah rocked the stache in the most badass manner:

Then we made the best pizza ever and revived Kristin's former Pagliacci pizza-tossing skills.

After (and maybe during?) pizza making, an enthusiastic dance party took place in which we tried out Amy's wedding dance mix.  99 percent of these photos are weird, unflattering and WEIRD.  We spent a significant portion of the evening trying to choreograph a routine to Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn so that we could perform it at the wedding, but at this point a few bottles of wine had been consumed and focus was easily lost.  This is the single dance photo that I deemed appropriate for the blog:

And then we did the only appropriate thing when you've each had a bottle of wine - we built a fire! And made s'mores! I ate no less than 6. The night deteriorated into one in which we confessed our love for one another, offered positive affirmations like we were at a women's retreat, performed rituals where we burned pieces of paper with myths about ourselves written on them, wrote new truths and offered them to the sea and lit a wish lantern. I'm sober now and it's still awesome.

The wish lantern moment was hard won and totally worth it.  After each making a heartfelt wish for Amy's wedding day, we then stood on the beach trying to light this thing for like 15 minutes without success (too much wind). We finally decided to try it in the backyard. There might have been a little negativity about our ability to make this happen - but some name calling and like 300 matches later, it happened! The lantern took off! And these photos don't capture even 5% of the magic that was watching it float hundreds of feet up into the air and slowly drift out of sight. And we totally freaked out when out of nowhere ANOTHER wish lantern floated into view and met up with the one we'd lit.  In our wine-adled state, we almost convinced ourselves that the other lantern was Dave's wish lantern, joining up with Amy in the big sky of love.  Ahem.