Sunday, July 13, 2008

Missing Old Friends

Yesterday, the kids and I returned to the blessed former county of residence for the day.

It was a most timely visit.

If I had not had to think about grades on Friday, I would have written a post about how I had begun to miss my friends. I have been too busy unpacking and dealing with the urgent stuff to miss them much, but it seemed to have suddenly caught up with me.

In fact, I had a surreal moment when, during our camping trip last weekend, I returned to our home for some forgotten items and a quick shower. For a second, it seemed to me like I had been vacationing in our new house for awhile, just as our camper seems like a vacation home, and for a split second I thought that I would soon be returning home to our old house, when vacation was over. It was a weird, displaced kind of feeling.

So I called one of my girlfriends, a homeschooling mom of six, on the phone last week. During our conversation, she reminded me that this weekend there were several performances of a musical, Snow White, by the community theater group that we did Narnia with last year (the one our whole family was in--see last July's archives for pictures!). Since we know the director, the musical director, the gal playing Snow White, and several other families, we couldn't miss the show....

So we drove down early enough to have lunch with my friend, the mom of six, plus five of her kids. It was so good to catch up and encourage one another on the homeschooling journey! We thoroughly enjoyed the show and hanging around afterward to visit with everyone we knew. Blondechick15 left us to join one group of theater friends and then spend the night with another friend, whose mom will bring her back tomorrow. We dropped off Bantam3 and Chicklet5 to play with the kids we had lunch with, and made our way to the home of some of our best and oldest friends, where Bantams 13 & 9 were invited to spend the night. (They will catch Blondechick's ride back later tonight.) The mom of that family and I went out to dinner and talked and laughed for nearly three hours before I had to pick up the two youngest again and head for home.

Today, Grandma and Grandpa drove up to join us for church, and Papa Rooster's brother, his wife and our niece came as well. We invited the family that got us up here to join us all for lunch, as well as a couple of single (for the day) men who visited from Down Below as well! (One was spending the weekend and kept PR company yesterday while his family was absent.) We had a wonderful time with them all.

So I feel like I've had a friend fix, for now. Just when I needed it.

Thank you, Lord, for riches in the friend department.

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