Has it really been 10 years?

Today I am finding it so hard to believe that we celebrated the new millenium ten years ago. It seems like just yesterday! I was a sophomore at Loyola University New Orleans who had planned to spend the last hours of 1999 dancing at Madigan's with my sorority sisters until the wee hours of the morning. Only there was an amazing opporunity presented to me that would forever make my world better. I sat bored in my mom's office a few days before NYE, when out of nowhere her boss asked if I would like to accompany his family on a quick trip to the Bahamas. WHAT?!?! Seems like an easy decision, right? But I had a hard time getting that image of my friends circled together in the very bar that defined our collegiate experience celebrating the start to a new century. I abandoned Madigan's for a world I could only dream of. I arrived in Nassau on the 29th of December very late in the evening to discover that I would be staying on a yacht, not a boat, but a yacht that had a deckhand and a chef and a dining table as big as the one in my parent's living room. I simply could not believe my luck! The next morning I met "the girls" as I would call them from that point forward. Elizabeth had just turned three and Gabrielle was about seven weeks old. And while I sure was lucky to have been able to cruise through the brilliantly blue water of the Caribbean and run my hands through the softest sand I had ever felt on Iguana Island and spend midnight on NYE watching the Atlantis Hotel's incredible fireworks display, the thing that made me feel the luckiest was being able to meet these two sweet girls. For the next three years, I travelled with the girls and their family and was just so truly happy to have them as a part of my life.

It is so hard for me to imagine that this all took place ten years ago. They were just babies. Heck, I was a baby. Looking back on the end of 1999, I realize that year might have been one of the best year's of my life. I did not know it then, but a few weeks after we returned from the Bahamas, I would have the honor of becoming a Sig Ep little sister. And just a few weeks after that, I would meet Mark for the first time at a mixer my sorority had with Tulane med students. We would later meet again, have a drink at Philips, and attend the med school formal - our first official date. It was a year I'll never forget, and it's nice every once in a while on days like today to look back and cherish every bit of what made it so special. And as I look forward, not knowing what the next ten years will bring, I feel excited and more than a little lucky.