Hosted a little gathering for an old housemate yesterday - we were in the same year at university and her husband was one year our senior. She and I housed together in 1998 for about six months, the year of her wedding after her husband went to Europe to do his MBA. We only shared accommodations for a very short period, as I had gone to Australia for the summer, spent most of the fall in Northern Ontario at mine sites and she left in January to transition to her new job, with her husband in London, England. Those few months in themselves seem like such a whirlwind of activity compared to my home-based life now. It will always be a memorable period because without our time together in our little rented house, I would never have discovered the husband ... who moved into the upstairs unit while I was away in Australia.
Alright, I digress from the topic at hand. A few weeks ago, she emailed the Canadian contingent to alert us of her pending visit for two days to the area before she travels to her family's cottage. She suggested a Sunday morning at a restaurant or a Monday evening at her husband's mom's place for a now fairly standard BBQ. Evenings on the other side of the city don't work for me (witching hour and traffic) and a Sunday morning restaurant visit, alone with three kiddos, is an unacceptable mission ... so why not host a party and let the kiddos run wild in the backyard. We only had 5 sets of adults - 4 pairs with kiddos and one brave friend who brought her boyfriend into the melee of 11 odd little kiddos, all 5 and under.
It is funny how times have changed. I remember her husband's friends as the fairly typical beer drinking, cool house in the student ghetto, type of guys. (I guess, also odd, I didn't find it at all unusual to have the girls' from my year here with a handful of children.) Now, we had several minivans parked in front of the house, little kiddos crawling on the kitchen floor, parental monitoring of the various spats, and discussions that quickly migrated to preschool, nutrition and discipline. One of the guys even came sans-wife with his 3 and 1 year old kiddos. Biggest change of all, though, might have been the 9am start - somehow in those 12 years since university ended for me, we all have become morning people. Any ideas why?
1 comment:
LOL ANN, we are forced to become morning people because the little ones (mine at least) don't sleep past the first chirp of the very fist wakefull bird!
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