Replenish your stores, my love.

I have a group of girl friends who are some of the main staples in the cupboard of my food of life. They are like vegetables, milk, bread, eggs, cheese... those things that you have to always have in your cart at the market. They help to sustain me and keep me sane and full of the relationship nutrients that us girls need to get through each year of life.

We try to get together as often as possible to replenish the minerals, however, since most of us live in different places, it doesn't happen as much as we'd like. But when we do, we turn into the girls from the movie Shag and have the most fun. We eat too much. We drink too much. We stay up too late. We talk too much. One of our husbands, no all of them, say that when we get together, we all talk, all at once, all about different stuff, and he (they) don't know what we're talking about or how we know what the other girls are saying. And, every sense of rational ability would refute that we would be capable of knowing what we're saying, but we do. We absorb it all. We take it all in. We hear everything.

Wherever we get together, we always find ourselves dolled-up (well, as much as 30-something-year-old moms can) and eating out, usually something Asian-inspired. In Columbia, we gravitate towards Miyo's, not because it's the best place to eat, but because it seems to be the easiest for us. We know the menu and we always have the same waiter and we never have to worry about thinking too much there. And we have the most fun.

We usually walk away from the weekends slightly hungover, but fully relaxed. We've gotten it all out. All of our gripes and worries and sadness from our everyday lives (and let's be honest...any woman who says that she doesn't have these is lying. Lying to others and herself. Nobody's life is perfect), and we can go back to rocking it out as mothers and wives and daughters and employees and all that stuff. This is something I will teach my Ella.

Last weekend, my Ella and I got together with some of our favorite girls in town for an afternoon out. We met up with Elissa and Greta and Cecelia for lunch at Miyo's, where we ate too much sushi and drank too much sweet tea. And because little girls aren't so used to the caffeine in tea, they were soaring with excitement and energy. Lunch was followed with mani/pedis, which gave our winter-worn feet some relief, much to the chagrin of the pedicurist, I am sure, because my heels were scary! After the nail salon, we did a little shopping and got the girls some clothes. It was sooooo funny to hear them squeal at every piece of clothing that they liked. Everyone in the store would look up each time they ooohed and aaahed. Hell, their pitches were so high that dogs in Georgia could hear them.

But the most important thing about that wasn't the food and nails and the clothes, it was the time that we got to spend together. It was the conversation and the laughter and the squeals. It was the break from life and the removal of ourselves from the mundane, from the necessary. Life hasn't been so simple for the Woods these past weeks, and I knew my Ella needed a pause with some special girls. It is so important that she learns to take the time for herself to replenish her stores. This is something we all must do.