Flashback Friday: Dipper Day

I feel especially lucky to have been blessed with good friends in and outside of my own family. Some of my close girlfriends have stuck with me through thick and thin for many years now and are, in many ways, more like sisters than anything else. One of these good friends is Amy Engelbrecht. She and I grew up in the same area and went to BYU together. She is tall with dark brown hair; on the contrary I hold legal-midget status along with my brown locks. Somehow along the way we picked up the nicknames, Big and Little dipper, and it has stuck like glue. I have always been proud to be a dipper along with Amelia!

Our Sophomore year in college, we ended up taking two classes together. These Tuesday/Thursday classes quickly earned the nickname "Dipper Days." We lived in the same complex so I would meet her at her apartment and together we would make the trek up to campus while we would laugh and talk about whatever we pleased. I guess it is true what they say about great minds thinking alike because it seemed, more often than not (and without planning), we would meet for the day with clothes that were remarkably similar. We thought this was hilarious because of how dorky it made us look. Dressing like twinners just isn't as cool in college as one might think- especially when one looks like a mini version of the other. It didn't help that we would roar with laughter wherever we went, drawing even more attention to ourselves.

Sadly, both of our classes were duds and if it weren't for the each other, we would have all the way hated ourselves for signing up for such bores. The worse of the two was our mission preparation class. We had both been toying with the thought of serving missions (and both later did) and thought that it would be a wonderful chance to get ourselves ready if the opportunity arrived. Boy were we wrong! The only thing I remember learning from that class was that our teacher had the (according to him) talent and could make it look like he was chewing grapes with his tongue and cheek and would conveniently incorporate that trick into nearly ever lesson we had. Amy and I didn't find this nearly as humorous as I am sure he had hoped. We mostly thought that he was about as nice, dorky, and boring as they come.

In this class, our teacher made us break up into groups for different projects that he called "districts" just like they do in real missions and he wanted each district to come up with a group name for themselves. LAME-O!!!! Our group consisted of us dippers and a strange girl named Raleen (who always made me hungry because her name reminded me of praline n' cream ice cream and our class was scheduled just before lunch). She thought this district naming thing was a terrific idea and excitedly told us about the name that her brother's district was called on his mission while we pretended to share a sliver of interest."Blah blah...it was such a cool name....blah blah blah....because they were all tall...blah blah...so could we call ourselves blah blah blah?...." As we really didn't care one bit about the name of our group, we told her that her name would do just fine.

Apparently we should have listened to her suggestion a little better because it didn't occur to us until we were all three standing and introducing our group how strange and inappropriate it was. There we stood at various heights, all three rather busty girls, while Pralines n' Cream proudly told the religion class that we were to be known as "The Mountain Tops." We could have died. As if dressing the same and giggling like crazy didn't already make us look bizarre enough!