It's fun for a girl or a boy........

Today my sweet friend Tracey invited Pumpkin and I to come spend the day at the pool at her country club. Pumpkin is only 1 remember so I packed along some small toys to keep her occupied after the novelty of the water and Tracey's kids wore off. At one point she was getting restless so I pulled out a toy. Suddenly kids swarmed around me clamoring for it. By the looks on their faces, you would have thought I was holding a 6-scoop giant ice cream cone. I told them that when Pumpkin got bored with it I was more than happy to share; and the crowd slowly dispersed with moans of disappointment. Despite the hoards of other kids to play with, the diving rings, kickboards and several other toys, a few boys and one girl stayed within earshot and never took their eyes off of Pumkin, just waiting for her to divert her attention to something else so they could pounce.

Finally one little girl could stand it no longer and slowly glided towards us, her brow furrowed as she thought of something to say. "Um, excuse me. I need to play with that," she mumbled with hesitation. As I had predicted, within a few minutes Pumpkin was no longer interested and I handed the toy off to the closest child. I then turned to talk to my friend and was interrupted by the sound of arguing as a much older girl (I'm talking like 12) tried to convince my friends' 4-year old to hand it over all the while trying to keep back the other two boys attempting to stake their claim.

What was the toy? Here's a hint. That's right, it was a slinky! I was amused and excited that even today with all of the flashing, singing, computing & motorized toys, these kids were seriously fighting over their turn to play with a slinky. The world is still a good place!!!

All those hotties

So, I have a fairly technology-literate grandmother who has been emailing me back and forth for the past eight years or so. I recently decided it would be cool to print out all the emails back and forth between her and I and get them made into a book here or at another one of these type of sites. I thought it would be a cool thing to have when she's not around anymore for my kids to be able to read and feel like they knew her a little bit since she is pretty amazing as I've previously pointed out.

Well when I was checking very very old email accounts to try to find all the emails, I came across one that had emails between my high school best friend and I from..........................1998! Isn't that crazy? I read one to my husband where she said something like "So that awards thing I had to go to tonight was fine I guess. There were a LOT of hotties there!" His response was "Nobody talks like that." Well, 18 year old high school girls do, I promise. I was laughing so hard reading through them that I had to call her. I don't talk to her as often as I should, probably only 4 times a year but I called her last night, even though it was 10 pm at her house and we giggled for over an hour at the silly things we had written and the memories they brought flooding back. It was one of the most fun hours I've had in awhile. And afterward I was thinking, it has probably been 4 months at least since the last time I talked to her on the phone and yet it was so easy when she picked up the phone for me to say "Hey, what are you doing? I'm about to pee my pants over some emails we wrote" without any how are you doing, what have you been up to, etc. (For the record, she couldn't believe that we even had email back in 1998!) That's the beauty of "old friends" as one of my favorite bloggers mentioned in a post a few days ago. (Go ahead and go read it, you'll agree)

I've long noticed that the good friends I've had in high school have something different than any other friends I've met along the way. Somehow time never seems to pass with these friends. Even if it was two years ago that you last talked to them, you can call them up and it feels like it was yesterday. And I swear they love you more, because they thought you were cool even back when you were the typical overly self-conscious high school girl, who wore a bit too much makeup to cover those acne breakouts, and said and did much sillier crazier stupider (is that even a word) things than you do now. So even though I don't keep in touch as well as she deserves (see above), it's sure nice to know that when I do, things haven't really changed that much. I mean sure, we both have husbands now, different jobs, a few kids under our belt (okay her two, me one) but at the end of the day, we still laugh at the same stuff. You know, like all the hotties that were there!