Start and End with Friends Pt 2

Having closed out the old year with good friends, 2008 started out in similar fashion when our little friends Isabella and Juliana initiated an impromptu play date with Ashley and Caitlin on New Year’s Day. This resulted in James and I having the unexpected pleasure of a few quite hours alone in our own home, which hasn’t happened very often since we’ve had the girls. Rosemary and Dave took all the girls to “Rainbow Park” (really called Webster Park, which is beside the Nordic Heritage Museum) to play and ride their bicycles and, before they left, we extended a spur-of-the-moment invitation to them all to join us for dinner when they returned from the park. Happily they were free. We were all so delighted to have another opportunity to spend an evening with friends in this way. Sharing dinner with friends like this is not something we’ve engaged in much over the years but the rewards certainly encourage us to want to do it more. 

By Wednesday we were on a roll spending time with friends. I took both girls to library story time (a bright side of Winter Break for Ashley who had been missing school so much), and then in the afternoon we had three of Ashley’s classmates to play. For the most part the afternoon was a great success. All the kindergartener’s happily involved Caitlin completely in their games. They dressed up, played imaginary games, and held a tea party in the study with real food that Caitlin had liberated from the fridge and water for their little teapot.

There was a moment when the good times turned bad. All the girls were posing for photos in their dress up clothes when Ashley fell and hit her head on a little stool. She had a big goose egg that bled briefly. All the girls were so sweet trying to think of ways to cheer her up as she sat on my lap, being snuggled by myself and James, while we iced her wound and monitored some double vision she was experiencing.  She was fine in the long run. There is nothing like snuggling on the sofa with your mum, sister and friends, drinking hot chocolate, eating Nazooks (a traditional Armenian pastry) and watching ‘Dora Saves the Mermaids’. With pampering like that how could you not feel better?!

Tea Party!

Gleeful Girls

Ashley, Caitlin, Olivia, Sophie and Aida Posing

The descent towards the "stool of doom".

In hindsight, the top of the sofa was probably not the best place to have a bunch of very excited girls pose for photos...I think this is an appropriate situation to apply Maylynn's advice for future reference, "try to make only new mistakes".