Girls Gone Wild

Like I mentioned on Friday's post, Marshall surprised me by inviting three of my best friends to fly out here and surprise me on Thursday and stay until Sunday. My friends Leigh, Lori and Laura (apparently I have a thing for girls with "L" names) were picked up from the airport by Marshall and then driven over to my in-laws' vacation house across the street. Marshall had just told me he needed to run an errand and then he returned home. Once he was back at the house, he texted them to walk over. When the doorbell rang he said, "It's for you". I was so shocked by the sight of my friends that I was literally speechless. All three of them were wearing their Twilight shirts, which was pretty ironic considering I was wearing my Twilight pants at the time.

The amazing thing is that Laura has a severe phobia of flying. She doesn't fly. And she reminded Marshall of that fact when he first invited them to visit. But after Lori and Leigh agreed to go, she knew she would regret allowing her fear of flying to prevent her from coming. So Lori and Leigh both flew to Laura's local airport, so they could fly with her out here. I am SO proud of her for getting on a plane to see me!

Laura was one of my three original readers when I started this blog in June 2006. She also adopted from Ethiopia. Lori contacted me to tell me how much she loved our Ethiopian adoption video while she was waiting to bring her Ethiopian daughter home. I met Leigh on Twitter due to our mutual love of Twilight. They all got to know each other from commenting on my Facebook page.

We literally had the time of our lives. I ignored my husband and kids and spent all my time at the in-laws' house with the girls. I got about 6 hours of sleep (total) between the first two nights and pulled an all-nighter their last night here. Man, I am way too old to be pulling all-nighters. But I don't regret it at all because we had a blast. So much so that the LAPD came to the door one night. Ok, well that's not entirely true. Laura was in charge of keeping the house key, which includes the house alarm key fob. As she was walking up to the house, she accidentally hit the panic button for the alarm, without knowing it. I rushed to turn off the alarm and waited for the alarm company to call so I could tell them it was a mistake. But they didn't call us. About 15 minutes later there was a pounding at the door with two LAPD officers outside. Uh, OOPS! Thankfully they were super understanding about the mistake. Ironically about 10 minutes after they left, we got a call from the alarm company. Nice, huh? Anyway, after that Laura had her key-holding privileges revoked. (Love you Laura!)

During our crazy weekend, the girls wanted me to take them to Rodeo Drive. And they told me they better see a celebrity or they'd never come out to visit me again. When we got there, we were very hungry and decided to eat lunch before walking up and down Rodeo. Three of us wanted to eat at Cheesecake Factory, because... well, they have GREAT food! But Lori protested saying there was no way we'd see a celebrity at the Cheesecake Factory. She was out-voted, so we went there for lunch. Now you know how some restaurants have one long bench across the room with several tables very close together? I usually loathe being seated there because you are so close to the other people. But they sat us on the end of the row which wasn't so bad. After our food arrived, they sat another party at the table right next to us. I glanced over and was shocked to see that sitting right next to us was Cam Gigandet, who happens to be the big bad guy in Twilight.

I informed the other girls of his presence and then proceeded to take covert pictures of him with my iPhone.

Oh, but we didn't stop there. Lori handed Leigh her videocamera and Leigh snuck a little footage of Cam while pretending to film Lori and Laura.

I've spotted lots of celebrities in public in my 13 years of living in L.A. so I was definitely not going to go up to him and say anything. But Lori had the guts (after her martini) to go up to him and ask him if he'd take a picture with us. I didn't really care about taking a picture WITH him, so I took the picture of Lori and Laura with him, while Leigh wanted to crawl under the table from embarrassment. Thankfully he was very cool about it all.

Seriously... this was totally crazy. All four of us are Twilight freaks, and the one celebrity we see when we get together, is a main actor in the Twilight movie. Oh, and while we didn't get to see Robert Pattinson, we found out that he flew to L.A. last weekend and flew out of LAX airport the same day Leigh, Laura and Lori did. Coincidence? I think NOT.

Now you may have noticed this picture from yesterday's post...

While Laura and Leigh declined, Lori and I decided to get tattoos together. Laura and Leigh hung out with us to keep us company though. We both got tattoos on our low backs. I got a custom design of three roses. Each one symbolizes one of my children and is in their favorite colors. The red one is for Seamus, the purple one for Marlie and the orange one is for Haven. The kids absolutely LOVE my tattoo and keep asking to see it. They then point out which rose is theirs.

Our visit was way too short and we're all going through serious withdrawal. But we've vowed to make our get-together a yearly event. We are all so thankful to Marshall's parents for letting us use their house. For more pictures of our get-together, check out the slideshow....