Joy in the Moments

I have been thinking a lot about how precious certain period of times are. Like high school, or "the College Years", or your first year of marriage, or the first year with a baby, things of that sort. And lately, about the last five months, I have been thinking about how precious this time of my life is. Not just this time with having little kids and trying to remember all the little joys of kids amidst the chaos of loudness and messes (yes, those are precious), but more so I have been thinking about how precious this period of time is when we live in such a great neighborhood with lots of kids and lots of LDS families. How fun it is to meet at the church parking lot and ride bikes, play tag, rollerblade, etc. When I was a kid it was the park in our neighborhood, but for my kids it is the parking lot and we LOVE IT. How precious this time is that we have a ton of fun young families in our ward, because lets face it, at least half of them will move away-and it makes me really sad to think about that. How precious this time is that I am surrounded with so many awesome "young" mom friends that are in the same boat as I am, trying to see the joy amidst the tiredness, and raise their kids with good values. I mean i just keep thinking about how much I want to soak in this time when I live in a "neighborhood/ward" like the one I grew up in, lots of kids, lots of fun, lots of moms doing fun things. And hopefully the Centerville Ward and this neighborhood will always be like this, but I want to really live it up in these moments.

March 21-
I wrote the top part of this post a few weeks ago, and then within a few days of writing it and not finishing it, my friend emailed me to tell me they were moving. It just hit me again how important it is that I want to enjoy these moments so much by doing things with people and building relationships and enjoying life. Great relationships are made by making memories. Little ones and big ones. Like last friday night, we had dinner here at the house with John and Carrie and Ryan and Melissa. It was great. Kristin was a saint and watched all the kids at Ryan and Melissa's. And us 6 adults (and the 2 babies) talked, bbq'd, cooked and ate and just enjoyed each others company. Then we went back to becks and had dessert and played games with the kids. I just keep thinking it is so important to plan things like that and make time to do them. Life gets crazy and then when you have a free moment you don't want to "plan" something, or go out of your way to do things when you are tired, but it makes for the best memories and builds such great bonds. Thank you Melissa for planning a very fun evening. And thank you Kristin for watching the kids.

Friday Evening

Friday evening we had dinner with some of my most favorite childhood friends. It was so fun to watch Brooke interact with all the boys. Ryan and Melissa have 3 boys and another on the way. Carrie and John have two boys, with a girl on the way. And Brooke was in the midst of all 5 boys (Livy had been sick all week, so thankfully my mom watched her so we could still have dinner with everyone and not infect all of their kids. And thank you Carrie, for having it at your house at the last minute.) It is always so fun to get together with them. One, to laugh about all the old times, but even more so, to see our kids starting to build the same memories as we had. I hope we all stick around long enough for our kids to be old enough to play night games at parkmont park every night (and into the morning hours) all summer long.