Outnumbered

Almost everyone...1 kid and 2 adults missing and a whole lot of 4-legged furries

This weekend was amazing.

My old roommates and their families came to visit. We lived together while they were in vet school and while I did a variety of things including deciding to go back to school for nursing.

I started nursing school during their 4th and final year of vet school. I began the academic year single and intending to stay that way until I met Geoff in October...(so, I didn't make it very long with those intentions)...and they both got engaged.

When they graduated they both moved in with their fiances and I moved in with Geoff. After 4 years of living with Sara she moved to Marquette, MI which seemed like the other side of the earth to me at times. Meanwhile Shannon moved to a southern suburb of St. Paul and I to a western suburb of Minneapolis. We weren't very far away from each other, but again it seemed like the other side of the world. Nursing school, starting a career, planning weddings...We had "busy" lives and we didn't see each other very much.

In retrospect it's one of my greatest regrets from that period of my life, I should have found more time to visit Shannon because now I live a state away and we all have kids and it is never as easy as it should be to get together.

Ever since Geoff and I moved to WI 5+ years ago all of us have tried to have annual or biannual reunions. Initially we were all without kids so our visits were centered around New Years and usually a camping trip in the summer (aka drinking). Then all of us girls were pregnant at overlapping times and things became more difficult. New Years no longer had the same appeal and then camping, well camping was a challenge.

On one of our first camping trips I realized I was pregnant a day or two before the trip. Then the next one fell 2 weeks after E was born and we went (we put extensive thought into this). Sara couldn't come because she was almost due (ended up having her baby a week later) and Shannon was ending the misery of the first trimester. Needless to say our camping trip lasted less than 24 hours. It started with excessive mosquitoes and ended with a downpour. It was too miserable with a two week old, but E will always have the right to claim he is hardcore and started camping at 2 weeks old.

All of us have still managed to get together plenty of times over these past three years, but it has definitely been more challenging. Again E is the oldest of the kids and he is just over 3.5 years old. There are 6 of us adults and 7 kids. (Shannon is an overachiever and had twins).

Sara now lives about a mile from my parent's house so when I go "home" it's inevitable that I'm at Sara's house at some point and Sara has come to visit me a couple times over the last few months while I was too sick or uncomfortable to travel to her. We've had a hard time coordinating all of our schedules and I've had a hard time knowing if I was going to feel up to a traveling, so this time everyone came to us.

Most of those are ours.

We conquered the children's museum and talked, played, ate, and drank our way through the weekend. There were so many times when I realized how lucky I am. I love my friends and their families and I am blessed to be able to watch my kids and their kids grow up together. There were times this year when I feared that I could miss out on moments such as these.

I have felt bad because our kids will never have cousins the same age that they will grow up playing with. We can't have more children so they likely won't have more siblings, but then I see all these guys together and I think these are the kids that my kids will grow up with. These are the kids that my kids will share over-embellished stories with and the line of what they "actually" remember and what they have been told so many times will become blurry.

There is something about all of us together that just feels right. Of course it is actually absolutely insane so by the end of the weekend all of the munchkins are melting down and everyone is ready to retreat back to their respective "normal" lives too.

By the time everyone left today I was exhausted and ready to crash. I wanted to get my kids back into a routine and just take it easy for the rest of the day. Maybe it's because I have a "self-reflection" assignment due for school, but I found myself reflecting on a lot of this weekend and what a blessing it really was.

I realized that no matter how hard it is for 3 three year olds to share, I am immensely proud of mine because he shared all of his toys all weekend. Of course there were plenty of times were he took things or wanted a turn, but what I mean is that there was a never a fit because everyone was playing in his house with all of his toys.

I love that Ella was enthralled with "the babies."  Really they aren't that much younger than her, but from the first moment I saw her with them she was instant friends.

I love that my zoo adopted an attitude of "5 more kids in our house...ya, whatever."

And finally, I love that all of this spawned day-dreaming between Geoff and I about what we want our future house to be like so we can continue to accommodate friends and family.