Not only is she a great friend in reference to the day to day, friend to friend stuff, but she also just goes above and beyond, randomly, and in the most thoughtful ways. I have 3 specific occasions that I am going to reference as examples, where each time I seriously just stopped and had to ask myself the above question, and inspired this shout out...
1- The first was a little over a year ago, when we came home from a 2 month trip to Utah. We got in rather late on our last day of our drive across the country and when we walked in, we were greeted by this (the last 3 pictures of that post). Danielle had ended up with a spare key to our house earlier that year, and found it while we were gone. So as a welcome home/practical joke, she and Amanda Jones snuck into our house and taped balloons everywhere, whoopie cushions in places, decorated our toilet, and most importantly had gotten us a small food supply to get us through until we could get to the store. Specifically, she even bought my favorite cup cakes (only something a true friend would have known ;) ). This may seem like not that big of a deal to you all, but I can't even tell you how good it made us feel. It was just so thoughtful, I know I would never have thought to do something so nice for someone else, so it just made it so meaningful to me.
2- This was in January last year. I can't remember the exact day that she called, but I'm pretty sure it was like the day before, I get a random phone call from Danielle, and she says "Want to go to Raleigh with me for a couple of days?" She had this whole plan that she had just spontaneously put together, she got us a hotel room and made all sorts of fun plans for her, the kids, and me. I hesitated when she called, because it was so last minute, but I figured "why not", and I didn' t reget it for a second. We had a blast. I love spending time with Danielle, driving for three hours each way and there was never a dull moment, plus we went to the kids museum and a natural history museum, we played in the pool, and ate real Carolina BBQ. It was a great trip. I remember just thinking, how lucky am I to have such a great friend. I can honestly say that I feel like I could tell Danielle anything, and I can totally be myself around her. Which just makes the friendship so comfortable. Here's the post from our trip.
3- Now this last incident was actually quite recent, and was the ultimate inspiration for this post. So in the last several months, doing "couponing" has kind of become a big deal in the Williamsburg ward with many of the women. Eric and I had toyed with the idea but the couple of times we'd tried it, it backfired and ended up costing much more than we anticipated. So needless to say, we weren't all that thrilled about trying it again. However, in August during a conversation with Danielle I had told her that we were feeling poor and that I had given the idea some consideration, however, I still had a bad attitude about it. So a couple of days later, I randomly get a phone call from Danielle, and she asked "So do you have time for Couponing 101 tonight?". I was surprised, but I submitted, if she was so willing to help, I might as well give it another shot, so I invited her over. When she arrived, she came through the door with her arms filled with supplies. I then found out that she had not only clipped all of the coupons from 4 newspapers for me (which is very time consuming, I soon found out), but also bought me a shoe container, scissors, staples, and dividers all for the purpose of storing my own coupon stock. When she saw my surprised response to all of these gifts, she simply replied with "I knew you wouldn't be willing to spend any of your money on getting started, so I figured that I'd get you started". Then she proceeded to teach me all of the ins and outs of couponing, at least what you could fit into about an hour.
Once again, I was just so taken aback at how unbelievably thoughtful it was for her to do that. I had had a lot of friends tell me about how great couponing was, and how it was saving them money, but she was the only one who took it upon herself to make sure that I learned how to do it. She then proceeded to take me with her for the next few weeks to the good sales at our local grocery store, where I actually learned quite a bit.
You know what they say, you give a women a coupon, you save a few cents, you teach her to coupon, and you save her ooples of dollars.
Proof:From last Wednesday to this Wednesday, the difference in the Jewell family budget:
Total savings - $210
With savings of up to 87% on one trip
And we still have $12 that we can use on our next purchase at Farm Fresh
There are a million other reasons why Danielle is a great friend, including her whitty sarcasim, and spontaneity, but I had to reference these three instances, because they just left little imprints, like my quote in the left column of the blog.
Thanks for letting me ramble on about her, and if you read this Danielle, thanks for being such a great friend, you really have a gift for it. I'm pretty sure that your only flaw is your distaste for Utah Mormons, but for you we'll overlook that small detail. ;)
