Full Circle

It's great to be home. Have I mentioned that already? We're catching up with family and friends that we haven't seen for ages. Yesterday we hung out with our great friends from college and last night we went to dinner with a couple of my best friends from high school. It's funny to think about how our lives have changed in the time we've known each other and then to think about where they might go.

The college group included eight adults and six kids. We sat around and ate pizza like we did ten years ago, but then it usually either preceded or followed an evening of drinking. This time we were dealing with nap schedules, filling sippy cups, chasing kids, issuing timeouts, teaching about sharing, discussing growth trends, sharing advice on the best childproofing stuff, when to take baby positioners out of cribs and which digital cameras have the least lag time. Not exactly the same conversations we were having way back when but it's fun because I think somehow, we all knew these days would come and that we'd all still be the same people, just with mini-me's running wild.

Wyatt was not his most charming self. Our decision that his in-car nap would suffice was a horrible one and everyone else at the party suffered for our misstep. Specifically, 3-year old Jack took the brunt of Wyatt's frustration when my dear, sweet boy decided to hit him in the head with a toy motorcycle. Wyatt also was kind of hungry, but apparently not enough to actually sit down and eat. There was a lot of wrestling, as I recall, in an attempt to get him to take a bite and actually both chew & swallow it before careening through the house again. As we were all multi-tasking to the best of our abilities, someone suggested that perhaps these get-togethers will be more fun in a few more years.

Because we are not completely stupid, we left Wyatt home with his grandparents while we enjoyed dinner at our favorite local brewery with my high school friends. The meal was great, and the beers were divine (oh, how I have missed beer that isn't mass-produced!) but the conversation was really the best part. One friend still lives here, so he and his wife filled us in on random high-school-classmate run-ins, while the other friend and I just laughed. It was a verbal tour through our senior yearbook and many of the people haven't crossed my mind in the years between (not that I've crossed theirs, either). But mostly our conversation involved our kids, our parents and our future plans. It's strange to think that we've been friends for literally half our lives.

And I kind of just have to sit back and think about how full life is, that we have these friends who knew us with zits and teenage angst, and friends who stood by us through heartwrenching breakups and the drama of the college social scene, and our great friends with whom we've parted ways at every step of our military journey. Somehow we always come back together, no matter the time or the distance, and we just pick up where we left off. And for that, I'm really thankful.