I’ve posted another flickr slideshow here from Matt’s birthday with some random pictures I took of Arden before the party - she’s completely and totally in love with her napper, and she calls it her “nigh-night”.  If she sees it at home during the weekend when I’m supposed to be washing it, she screeches and flaps until she can get it open and crawl into it.  So if you’re wondering what’s up with the pictures of Arden in her napper in broad daylight, well, my friends, that is the deal. 

www.flickr.com cdelbueno’s Matt’s 8th Birthday Party photoset

We had a busy weekend.  Some of it was fun busy; some of it was not so fun.  On Saturday morning we visited with Lois and Ken - Ken is sick and not doing so well right now, and it was hard to see him like that.  I want to help Lois in whatever way I can because she certainly has a lot on her plate right now.  I’m not sure what we can do yet but I’m hoping I’ll come up with something.  I feel very helpless and that’s a frustrating thing to feel. 

Sunday morning we did a bunch of work around the house and got ready for Matt’s party.  Lily kept referring to his bowling party as “golf”.  We kept explaining that it was bowling, but she didn’t really care.  And she managed to have a good time even without it being golf.  Mike had to help her get the ball into her hands but once she got the hang of it she reverted back to her old fiercely independent self.  Arden couldn’t really bowl as her feet were about 10 sizes too small for the smallest set of bowling shoes, but that made her really mad and she kept grabbing bowling balls off the rack and trying to run away with them.  Needless to say, the bowling ball probably weighs more than Arden and Mike, in his usual workers’ comp frame of mind, feared a hernia and made her leave the bowling balls alone.  She had a couple of fits because she was so determined to throw the balls, but we finally distracted her by feeding her.  Food works wonders with Arden.

Seeing all those 8 year old boys made me glad I have girls - at least until they hit their teen years.  All that testosterone!  All that wildness!  Bowling balls everywhere - people being hit in the face with slinkys - maniacal Pepsi drinking and massive food consuming . . . .ah, boys.  Mike told me that he noticed the girls in attendance were all very well behaved, but the boys were acting like they’d been left inside a very small box for 8 years and were seeing the outside world for the first time.  It was pretty funny. Christine admitted that not much stresses her out, but boy’s birthday parties definitely do.  When I left I told her to enjoy her afternoon of heavy drinking and valium use because I know that’s what I would have wanted after chaperoning for that many boys. 

In the meantime, I finally caught up with Colleen, my long-lost friend I’ve known since ditching CCD class in Traverse City.  We knew each other through so many bad hair styles, leg warmers, black lipstick and white pancake, and numerous loser boyfriends.  We even lived together for a short stint in college.  She got a ticket and is flying up here this weekend. I hope her ovaries don’t shrivel when subjected to our children.  It was bizarre talking to her last night.  Just like I said in my email, it’s weird to condense a decade of your life into 4 paragraphs - or whatever the length is.  We condensed long relationships, courtships, beginnings and endings of jobs and careers into an hour-long phone conversation.  You miss so much of someone’s life when there are gaps in communication, and I know we can’t get that back.  All we can do is try to reconnect and find out if we still like each other, and move forward. 

I’ve thought it before, but I was able to specifically voice it to Colleen that I am missing so many of my memories from college.  Not from the usual beer-induced hazes, either.  She was telling me hilarious stories about things I couldn’t remember or had forgotten. You could almost hear the dust rising from my brain as things became more clear.  I told her that my anti-depressants in college weren’t really being watched, and my dosage then was nearly 3 times the amount I take today.  It wiped out my short-term memory and blurred some of my long-term memory. More than anything else I regret that. It’s hard to lose years of your life and have no connection to them.  Strange that I can still recite my addresses to you:  808 Monroe Street, 602 Catherine Street . . . but I can’t tell you the name of the girl who got me through orientation or the name of Zack’s roommate that used to torture me with his inane sense of humor, or Colleen’s boyfriend that had a penchant for odd things that can’t be discussed in a mommy blog.  I remember still the name of people in my creative writing honors group but can’t remember what I wrote about, or where those things are now.  I remember being miserable because of Keith, but only because I remember the drive between Birmingham and Ann Arbor - not because of the specifics of what he said or did.  So I have to apologize whenever I run across people from college because chances are, I’m not going to remember them, or what I said, or what I was even like. 

So Colleen will be here this weekend.  She’s planning to open a store in Traverse City eventually, so I figured I’d haul her down to Carytown and let her see Richmond’s version of Front Street.  Heck, she might like it so much she’ll move here instead.  Not.