the tale of the earrings

Early in the Christmas season, I had two thoughts: a) I really wanted to gather some ladies together to celebrate together and b)ooooohhh.... my friends are very stylish. I put these thoughts together and decided to have a little great-gift-white-elephant party. Not a tacky-horrible-gift-exchange, but a "let's celebrate our good taste and have a ten dollar limit party"! You get the idea.

So the party is in full, awesome swing and the gift exchange begins. Sweet Kelly is one of the first or second to choose and she gets the sweetest earrings you've ever seen from stylishly amazing Marcy. My jaw drops. I look at Marcy and she whispers, "I thought of you when I bought those! I knew you'd love them!" And I do! Vintagey cloth buttons made into earrings. Long story short, they get stolen from Kelly, but not by me, and somene else goes home with them.

Fast forward a few days. Those earrings are still on my mind. It's Christmas Eve and we're just home from church, in the middle of a packing frenzy, and I hear a knock-knock-knock on my door. It's Marcy, with a similar pair of earrings that she just got in the mail from Etsy, not intended for me - but gifted to me because, well, she's too much and too sweet. I'm in awe.

I wear them the next day on the plane, even though they don't totally match my sweat pants.

I wear them on for the first week of my trip, telling everyone the story of my awesome earrings.

Then one day, Nick greets me on the stairs at my mom's house and says semi-casually,

"I'm really sorry but one of your earrings fell down the sink today".

I reply, "No biggie!" (I mean, none of my earrings cost more than ten dollars).

He looks at me more seriously.

"NO! NO! NO! Don't tell me it was the button earrings!"

Longer story short, he saves our marriage and pulls the sink apart and gets it.

Fast forward a few days and even longer story short, I lose the earring AGAIN putting a baby in the car, find it again.

Next day, as I'm finding previously mentioned earring, I lose the other one. I'm not even kidding! In the process of finding earring A, I lose earring B.

Ten minutes later, I miraculously found earring B.

I'm scared to wear them now, but come on? Look at them!

Also, everytime I lose one and almost go to pieces, I hear the faint "where your treasure is, your heart is also". But have you seen those things? Ugh, they're too great.

Great earrings are a blessing and a dilemma all at once.

Friends like Marcy are just a blessing.

*We're heading home tomorrow morning! I can't wait to see all my NW friends very, very soon.*