Arwen/Elizabeth

Housekeeping

Today is the last day of LoLiBloPoMo, and I'm proud to say I pulled it off!  Yeah, there was that one week when both my Monday and Wednesday posts were late, but they still happened.  That's pretty good for me.  I'd say things are looking good for NaBloPoMo.

Despite being desperately in need of ideas for what the heck I'm going to post about for thirty days, I'm pretty pumped.  (If you have ideas, post them in the comments, please.  I could use some help!)  Not just because of all the writing I'm going to be doing, but because of all the bloggers I love who are signed up for NaBloPoMo too, and will be providing me with reading material through the month.  Maggie's doing it.  Ariella's doing it.  Jen's doing it.  Tracy's doing it.  My MOM is even doing it!  It's going to be a rocking month.

To keep things rocking around here, I've come up with an idea.  Here it is: any reader who posts a comment on every entry I post during the month of November will receive a prize, hand-mailed by me, at the end of the month.  I can't say what the prize will be because I haven't thought of it yet, but I promise it will be cool.  Or at least not so completely lame that it makes you want to cry.

(I hesitated about this idea because I was afraid it make me seem egotistical.  "Pay attention to me, and I will reward you!"  But I've never tried to hide the fact that I, like any self-respecting blogger, love me some comments.  Besides, it could be fun for you, too - a way to participate in NaBloPoMo on a somewhat smaller scale.  You could make a theme to your comments, or post entirely in limericks or haiku!  See, you're excited now, aren't you?)

Ahem.  Moving on.

Last night was the tenth night of our experiment in night-weaning.  I'm happy (no, thrilled.  You have no idea how thrilled.) to report that the whole thing has gone far better than we expected it would.  Dr. Jay Gordon (whom I would like to send a present in gratitude for making our lives SO MUCH BETTER) warns that some babies will cry for up to an hour when you first start refusing to nurse them in the middle of the night.  We've been lucky, because in ten nights Milla has cried for a grand total of less than an hour.  These days, when she wakes up at all, she merely fusses for a few seconds before letting herself be patted back to sleep by her heroic father.

I was apprehensive before we started night-weaning, and considered putting it off for a few more months, but I'm so glad we didn't wait.  Considering how quickly she took to it, I'd say Camilla was definitely ready.  And *I* was incredibly ready.  It's nice to finally be getting some decent sleep again.

In case there are any baby-sleep junkies out here, here's a comparison of a typical night two weeks ago with a typical night now:

Two weeks ago (times are approximate):
8:30pm - rocked to sleep by Daddy
9:15pm - wakes up crying, rocked back to sleep by Daddy
11:15pm - wakes up crying, nursed back to sleep by Mama
11:30pm - parents to bed
2:00am - wakes up fussing, nursed back to sleep by Mama
4:00am - wakes up fussing, nursed back to sleep by Mama
6:00am - wakes up fussing, nursed back to sleep by Mama
7:30am - up for the day

Now:
8:30pm - rocked to sleep by Daddy
11:30pm - woken up by Mama to nurse before midnight
2:00am - wakes up fussing, patted back to sleep by Daddy
6:00am - stirs, patted back to sleep by Daddy
7:00am - wakes up fussing, nursed back to sleep by Mama
8:30am - up for the day

We're still hoping and expecting that it will get better.  We'd love it if she would sleep through the night, although it'll probably be a while before we cut out the 11:30pm feeding - she still nurses a lot and seems very hungry at 7:00am.  Since I, an adult, don't have the ability to go twelve hours without food, I'm not going to fault my one-year-old for not being able to do it.

At any rate, I feel like I've got a new lease on life.  Does anyone want to come over and party?

One more thing before I go: I've gotten a couple requests that I share my meal-planning and grocery-list making tools.  Normally I'd just email these people personally, but November is nearly here and I Need Material, so I'll be doing a post on it, complete with screenshots, one of these days.

I bet you're all pumped for NaBloPoMo now, aren't you?

The Balloons Were a Hit

I've always thought that no one-year-old *needs* a birthday party.  The world is certainly not going to implode if a person who is incapable of grasping the concept that it's her birthday fails to have the bash of the year in celebration.  I've gone on record with this opinion, and if you'd asked me six months ago if my child would be having a party for her first birthday, I would've said no way.  What parent of a baby has the energy for something like that?

But, eh, we decided to throw one anyway.  We've got more energy now than we did six months ago, and we also happen to actually enjoy having people over, so it wasn't like throwing a party would be painful.  Plus, it turns out our child is pretty sociable, and loves it when a lot of people are around, especially if some of them are short like her. 

The party was two weeks after her actual birthday for the same reason that Camilla's spent about 8 weeks' worth of nights in beds other than her own, despite being only 54 weeks old.  We go places a lot, and we do stuff, and so do the people to whom we're related, so the 27th was the first day that would work.  I'd like to say that I anticipate in future years we'll be able to have her party on the 14th like it should be, but along with being busy we're also not very organized, so the chances are slim.

Anyway, this year's party was technically for both Bryan and Camilla, since his birthday's four days after hers and I didn't want him to feel left out, not that he cared.  This changed the nature of the event not at all, except that I made two cakes instead of one.

(yellow cake with lemon filling and Italian meringue frosting; chocolate fudge cake roll)

I can't take credit for how the cakes look, because my youngest sister kindly decorated them for me.  I can take credit for the taste, but unfortunately it's hard to share that over the Internet.  I do have bandwidth limits, you know!

I tried to get a picture of the birthday people with their cakes.  As you can see, Milla was not such a fan of that.  I think she was mad that we were keeping her from her adoring fans and her brand-new toys.

She also didn't quite get the blowing-out-candles thing, and had to be assisted by her father.  Maybe next year she'll figure it out.

We gave her cake, of course.  It's obligatory.  I don't think she actually ate any of it, though.  She's such a weird kid.  Tonight she was a huge fan of the homemade split pea soup I gave her, but cake?  Nah.  She mainly just played with the frosting.

What IS this strange fluffy white stuff?

And why do you keep taking pictures of me?

I have to admit that I sneakily nursed her right before we gave her cake, hoping to avoid having a baby with a huge sugar high.  Also, we gave her yellow cake and I'm sure she would have preferred chocolate, but I'm not crazy.  The kid sleeps badly when *I* eat chocolate in the evenings.  Giving it to her would be an act of lunacy.

She did have fun painting herself with frosting, even if none of it went in her mouth.  Thank heavens we stripped her down beforehand.  A quick bath, and she was as good as new.


I figured out the white stuff!  Don't I look pretty?

Thanks to my very sensible husband and his voice of reason in the face of my Hostess Complex, I managed not to over-plan (much) on the food, and thus didn't have to kill myself with preparations, which was nice.  Our daughter had so much fun that I barely saw her during the entire party, and considering that she is the ultimate mama's girl, that's saying something.  It was a nice break for me, too.  I'm thinking about throwing another party just so I can get people to play with my kid.

As it always seems to go at such things, the best moments were the unplanned ones.  And the best toys were not the toys themselves, but the boxes they came in.

Year One has been duly celebrated.  Bring it on, Year Two!

Birthday Video

Camilla's birthday was almost two weeks ago, but I've got to keep up my street cred as a procrastinator, so I couldn't possibly finish her birthday video more than twenty-four hours before her actual birthday party, which is tomorrow.

The song you'll hear on the video is a hymn that's been around for a while, set to music by Fernando Ortega's.  We got the album when Camilla was a newborn, and I was drawn to this song and have sung it to our daughter from the first days of her life. 

For me it is the soundtrack of what she is to us: proof that His faithfulness is indeed great.

I Can Cook

I grew up in a house where my mom cooked dinner every night, and did a good job of it.  (Of course I didn't like everything she cooked - what kid does?  But she still did a great job.  Sorry for all those times I complained, Mom!)

When I got married, I was determined to be the same way.  I got my mother to write down all my favorites of her recipes.  I made menu plans just like she did, on pretty little calendars I designed in Excel.  I grocery shopped and got dinner on the table every night.  (Except when I had a paper due or Bryan was spending the evening in the computer lab.  We were students, after all.)

But gradually, my cooking efforts petered out.  The recipes I liked from my childhood weren't numerous enough to comprise a decent repertoire, and after I'd paged through the two cookbooks I owned, I didn't know where else to look for new recipes.  Plus, cooking just takes a lot of time and energy.  When I was a student I imagined I'd cook more after I graduated, but then I had a full-time job and didn't make it happen, and then I was seriously depressed and then I got pregnant and, well, it never happened.

It still seems strange to me that I didn't start cooking dinner regularly until after I had a baby.  Everything takes longer and is more complex once you have a baby, so shouldn't I have been cooking less, not more?  But since I hated all food when I was pregnant, my joy in discovering that I liked it again postpartum was enough to overcome my exhaustion and the complications of regular meal planning and cooking.  Plus, I just decided I was going to do it, and a year later, I'm pretty proud to say that I cook dinner almost all of the time now.

Thing One that helps is that I've got more places to go for inspiration.  I discovered cooking blogs.  Like I already mentioned, I got into reading food books.  My mom gave me a subscription to Cuisine at Home, and I later subscribed to Cook's Country, and more recently Bon Appetit and Gourmet, myself.  (Kraft also sends me their Food and Family, but that's more like a giant advertisement than a magazine.)  I also discovered online places to find recipes (I like Epicurious, Recipezaar, and AllRecipes, in that order).  Reading about food, and constantly being exposed to recipes that make me go, "Oh, I'd like to try that!" helps me a lot when meal planning time comes around.

Thing Two that helps is that I've changed the way I meal plan.  The way my mom does it - several weeks at a time, assigning meals to specific nights - is great for her, but doesn't work so well for me.  I do one week at a time, and don't decide ahead of time which meal I'm going to cook which night.  That way on any given night, I can choose from several options on the weekly menu, and make what I feel like making. 

Thing Three is technology, baby.  I always hated writing out the grocery list, and mentally adding up the total to make sure I was staying within my budget.  Plus, I'd always forget to put something I needed on the grocery list, and three days later I'd be making a meal and find myself without an essential ingredient.  Enter spreadsheets, glorious spreadsheets.  Now I make my menu list for the week in one spreadsheet, and as I write down each meal I look up the recipe if necessary, and duly note all the special ingredients I'll need for it.  Then when I'm making my grocery list - in another spreadsheet that keeps an automatic tally of all my price estimates for various items - I simply transfer the individual items from the other spreadsheet, and nothing gets missed.  Also, the grocery store I use has its weekly sale ads online, so I can cross-reference those as I'm planning and make sure I'm getting good deals.  Ta da.

Thing Four that helps is that I find that the more I cook, the better I get at it.  The better I get at it, the more I enjoy it.  The more I enjoy it, the more I want to cook.  It's a beautiful cycle!

I think during NaBloPoMo I'm going to post sometimes about what I'm cooking.  That wouldn't be too boring, would it?

Zzzzz... wait. What?

I'm firmly convinced that I did myself a favor by going into this parenthood gig with low expectations about the sleep thing.  There's a lot of "sleep expert" hype about how babies absolutely have the ability to sleep through the night at 12 pounds or 3 months or whatever random number came up during sleep-expert roulette that week, but I read Ask Moxie.  I have friends with babies.  I know that it is a rare kid who hits twelve pounds and obligingly begins giving her parents the supposedly-attendant twelve solid hours of sleep per night.

The result of my low expectations, which had been pushed even lower by the arrival of Her Royal Fussiness, was that I was thrilled when my by-then-fourteen-pound baby started deigning to nurse back to sleep rather than making me get out of bed and pace the house with her, something I was doing at least once a night well into her fourth month.  The fact that I'd also figured out how to sleep with her curled up on my arm so that I barely had to move to get her latched on made me even happier.

For the next six months all was well.  Milla transitioned to sleeping in the middle of the bed with her parents curled obligingly around the bottom corners, then we fashioned a crib-sidecar and she started using that space for sleep, and it was all pretty good. 

But when she was ten months, the baby decided to throw us a curve ball and start waking every forty-five minutes.  That only lasted a couple of weeks, but you don't recover from something like that in mere moments.  Plus, time was ticking on, and the longish (5-6 hours) periods of sleep she'd given us on a couple of occasions turned out to be cruel teasers.  We were implementing some tactics from The No-Cry Sleep Solution, and they helped some, but we appeared to have hit a plateau.  Camilla was waking at least three to four times a night, not counting the unpredictable (somewhere between zero and three) number of times she woke between her bedtime of 8:00pm and ours of 11:00pm.

And except for a small handful of teases, I hadn't slept for more than three or four hours straight in a year.  Low expectations had served me well when dealing with an infant.  I never drove myself crazy trying to get a baby who was only a few months old, and high-needs at that, to adhere to some preconceived notion of how she should be sleeping.  But now that we had an almost-toddler, and with the effects of long-term sleep deprivation taking their toll on me, it was time to do something a little more drastic.

There's one thing that we will never do to get our child to sleep, and that is let her be scared in any way, which is why cry-it-out is not for us.  There are also a number of things we'd rather not do, including moving her to another room before she's ready, and taking away any of her comfort mechanisms against her will.

But sometimes you have to do things you'd rather not do.  (Like wake up in the middle of the night to comfort a baby back to sleep.)  Gentler methods may have worked eventually, but gentler methods don't make life better for a baby whose mother has gone batty from sleep deprivation.  Which is why we decided to night-wean.

This is the method we're using.  It fits with the way we like to do things around here.  We started (dun-dun-duuuuuun) last night.

We were both apprehensive (we all would have been, but the baby had no idea what was coming) but the first night went better that I could have hoped.  The method involves letting the baby cry while you comfort her with patting and shushing from right next to her, and it says some babies can cry up to an hour at a time, but Milla cried only five minutes the first time, two minutes the second time, and one minute the final time she woke up.  I know because I was watching the clock.

Our own customization of the plan involves Bryan and me switching sides of the bed so that he's sleeping next to the baby in her little crib-sidecar, and he takes the job of comforting her back to sleep in the middle of the night.  For these first three nights I still have to move over and nurse her a little before he commences with the patting and shushing, but then I get to hand the job over to him.  Since I've been doing night duty single-handedly for about nine months, this feels like a huge break to me.

Bryan is unfortunately a little tired today, and it will probably get worse before it gets better.  But he agrees that it's worth it to keep me from going nuts and selling all our furniture on eBay, or whatever the manifestation of my insanity would be.

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about night-weaning, if it'd be too hard on me to be making my baby so mad, but when the time came at 2:00 this morning, it felt right.  A couple months ago, it probably would have felt wrong, but now it's time.  I know it is.

A reasonable amount of zzzzzs are coming my way soon.  I can feel it.

Trippy

I've already written about the first two parts of last week's trip to New England - our time in Cape Cod with friends, and our time in Maine - but I didn't get to the third and final part, which was three nights in New Hampshire with relatives.  Also, pictures!

Maine is cool and lighthousey, and this is the Nubble Light, which was not far from where we stayed.  The area is pretty touristy but we were there in October, so it was not crowded, which totally made up for it being windy and chilly the morning we visited this lighthouse.

This is the view from the balcony of our room at the York Harbor Inn.  Milla did not really want to have her picture taken, as you can see.  Bryan is just funny-looking like that.

That's a little sliver of the Atlantic Ocean in the background.  I don't know if it's because we grew up in a town that is right on one of the Great Lakes, but Bryan and I both agreed that we found the neat historical buildings and the fishing boats and whatnot far more interesting than the big body of water.  People who have never seen the Great Lakes tend to think of them as being just like other, normal-sized lakes, but from the shore, Lake Huron or Lake Michigan or any of the others looks pretty much just like the ocean.  So we were kind of... over the ocean.  Huge body of water?  Been there, done that.  It was still really cool to be in Maine, though.

(Gratuitous baby pic makes an effective segue, right?)

After Maine we drove a whopping eighteen miles to New Hampshire to stay with my dad's sister and her husband and my cousins David and Sarah.  All of them were great with Camilla, and if they hadn't already been loved ones by virtue of being dear relatives, they would have won my heart just by doting on her the way they did.

The town they live in is happily historic like all of New England (compared to Michigan, anyway). The below picture is of us on an historic bridge over a waterfall that ran historic mills, with historic buildings in the background.  If we were still in elementary school, we SO would have gotten extra credit points for that trip.

One of the things we visited while we were there was a little apple orchard, pony ride, pumpkin patch dealio (surprisingly and delightfully uncommercialized, plus they had unpasteurized cider).  I've always, Scrooge-like, scoffed at people who took pictures of their kids in pumpkin patches.  It's so posed!  So cliche!  But now I understand.  If you have a child and a camera and you come across some pumpkins sitting in a field, you can't NOT take a picture.  Those pumpkins exert some sort of magnetic pull.  It is powerful.  And you know what?  The pictures actually turn out pretty adorable, if your kid is cute enough.

I've wanted to take a trip to New England in the fall for as long as I can remember, and now I've finally done it.  And with my own little family, no less, which makes it much more than just a fun experience.  It makes it something priceless.

(Bryan's shirt says, "Real Men Do Dishes".  That is also priceless.)

In Three Years He'll Be Thirty

Last year Bryan's birthday was kind of a dud for him, I think.  We had a very new newborn and I was recovering from giving birth, and I wasn't allowed to drive so I didn't even manage to pick up a card for him, and it was a good thing my mom was here to make dinner because otherwise he would have been eating soup from a can on his birthday.

I'm really trying hard to make this birthday better for him.  He deserves it.  Man, does he ever deserve it.

Six years ago, Bryan and I came dangerously close to breaking up rather than deciding to get married.  Sometimes in bed at night I break into a cold sweat remembering, and then I say a prayer of thanks for the outpouring of grace that managed to get us through that, and to make us both realize that we were meant to spend the rest of our lives together.  Preferably sooner rather than later. 

Bryan and I often joke about how sorry we are for all the other parents in the world, because we got the best baby ever and they're missing out.  What I don't say to him - at least not often enough - is that I feel that way about him, too.  All those other poor women, missing out with their substandard husbands, while I have the cream of the crop.

This point of view is, of course, merely a feature of the fact that the ones we love are most precious to us.  Still, even objectively, I think I got a pretty good one.

I stay home with the Billa and he gets up an hour or two before we do, every day, and goes to work to provide for our family, and then he comes home and matches me diaper for diaper, and puts the baby to bed at night, and takes out the trash and does laundry and never ever complains if he gets home and I haven't gotten around to starting dinner or even coming up with a dinner to make.

And all the things that make him really special are less tangible, harder to describe, but even more important.  Like the way he has never, even once that I can remember, made a comment that made me feel the tiniest bit unattractive - and the way I know he's committed to helping our daughter respect and love herself as well.  The way he's the only one who gets some (okay, a lot) of my jokes, and the way he's sympathetic when I make a joke so bad HE can't even laugh at it, like he really wishes he could make it funny for me even though it's not.  The way he's never rude to people, and even if he's quiet they feel comfortable around him, and the way he loves to give gifts and surprises and make other people happy.

I could go on all night, but he's here, and it's his birthday, and even more than I want to write about him, I want to spend time with him.

Happy birthday, Babe!

Disappointment

I seriously can't believe I am doing this, but to avoid another email from my brother it is necessary.

If he gets on me about the fact that this is not a real post but merely a stop-gapper, I'm going to have to sic Joe (our parents' dog) and Daniel on him.  They are fierce.

Real post coming tomorrow, which also happens to be my dear husband's birthday.  Twenty-seven years.  Ouch.

Kisses, sweetie!

Year in Review

(This was meant to be finished and posted last night, but I chose sleep over blogging.  No one called me on it except my brother, from whom I got this email: "It is 12:08 Tuesday morning where you are.  Need to get and stay on the ball.  Make sure I get a mention in your next post for keeping you honest."  Hee.  He's so cute and military-ish now. 

Anyway, with my apologies, here you go.)

Sunday, October 14th was Camilla's first birthday.

I know the year-in-review birthday photo post has been done other places*, and I can't claim to have thought of it first.  But hey - I thought of it TOO!  That has to count for something.

Month One was when we met our long-awaited Camilla Claire.  I was totally unprepared for the huge love that absorbed me from the moment I first saw that little blue, vernix-covered face.  I still get shivers thinking about it.  Falling in love with my daughter was what made recovery and the challenges of brand-new parenthood fade into the background.

Month Two was when those challenges got big enough to resist fading into the background.  Camilla looks so peaceful in this picture, but she was very fussy at this age.  She cried so much that I often cried too, out of sheer frustration and exhaustion.  Life during those weeks was a day-in, day-out object lesson in the truth that love is much more about commitment than it is about feelings: it was commitment that gave us the strength to pace the floor at 3:00am, to keep going, to keep caring for a fussy, high-needs baby when we felt like our own resources had been completely zapped.

Month Three had quite a bit more of the same.  We were not unhappy, but neither were we relaxed and enjoying ourselves.  We were contented but worn.  In retrospect, it occurs to me that maybe this is what new parenthood was supposed to be about: being pushed to the edges of our sanity, being almost - but by the grace of God not quite - broken, so that we could have the chance to realize the enormity of the task we'd undertaken, and to commit ourselves fully to this new person and to each other.

In Month Four we got to start reaping the benefits of that commitment.  Thanks to decreased fussiness and increased interactiveness on the baby's part, and some well-honed coping methods on our part, we started really getting to enjoy our child.

In Month Five I was thrilled to find that the fussiness finally seemed to have left us, thrilled to find that it was actually possible to get a decent amount of sleep, and slightly dismayed to find that once babies aren't newborns any more, you actually have to entertain them.  Who knew?  Also, looking back at the pictures reminds me that it was around this time that Billa started to lose her newborn looks and grow into the face she sports so prettily now.

Month Six brought more discoveries.  Like: Hey, the baby isn't just a high-volume bundle of needs, she's a person!  With a personality!  A fun and enchanting personality!  And also, she screams bloody murder when her mother leaves the room, even just to go to the bathroom!  Still, the good far outweighed the bad.  Is it redundant to mention how much we really, really love our daughter?

The worst part of Month Seven was the time we drove 300 miles in one day, and it's a good sign when the worst part of your month only lasts six hours.  We did swear that for any infant-accompanied trip longer than that one, we will hereby always and forever take an airplane, but the hell of six hours in a car with a restless baby was over in a flash, and we seriously enjoyed the rest of the month.  As you can see, above.

In Month Eight my sister came to live with us for the summer, which was beneficial for all concerned.  Having her around made my life a lot easier, plus Milla just kept getting more and more fun.  A highlight of this month was that she finally started rolling over back-to-front.  Her gross motor skill development seems to indicate that she has inherited her parents' lack of athleticism.  When she doesn't make the volleyball team (or any other team except quiz bowl) in high school, she is so going to blame us.

Month Nine was Camilla first started really interacting with Daniel, which is to say that he was tenuously walking, so he'd regularly toddle into her and accidentally knock her over.  Heaps of fun for all concerned, but she loves him beyond belief anyway.  She also started crawling near the end of this month, and I think it's safe to say that a little coordinated movement of hands and knees has never made me so excited before. 

With Camilla finally crawling, I learned in Month Ten that babies who can move themselves across the room are much more difficult to watch.  My days of sitting on the floor with my laptop while the Billa played happily next to me - without once attempting to GET my laptop - were over.  Fortunately, the trade-offs were good.  I love having a mobile baby (MoBaby).

MoBaby almost killed us during Month Eleven when she decided that sleeping more than an hour or two at a time was a sign of weakness and to be avoided at all costs.  On the other hand, she said "cracker" - her first spontaneous (as opposed to mimicking) word besides "Daddy" and "Mama", which almost killed her parents again, this time with delight.  (Who knows why standard developmental milestones are so thrilling for parents.  I blame sleep deprivation and hormones.)  (Either those, or plain old garden-variety love.)

During Month Twelve we started realizing that our baby was disappearing, leaving in her place an active, interactive almost-toddler with quickly-developing verbal skills, a sense of humor, and an infectious delight in the conventions of daily life that made us begin looking at the ordinary with new eyes.  The refrigerator and the dishwasher are wonderlands; a simple book, read dozens of times already, is an adventure: what will the duck and the horse say this time?; a bowl of ice cream is not just a snack, but a hundred chances for a bite of pure bliss.

To say that life is better now... well, wouldn't that just be the understatement of the year?

*Special apologies to Emily.  My due date was three days after hers, I gave birth four days after her, and now I'm doing the birthday photo post six days after her.  I'm sure she thinks I'm a big fat copycat - I hope she remembers that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Not That Thirty-Five Is Elderly in Any Way

Due to a wireless-network-related snafu, I'm currently without the technology to give you a picture-loaded this-is-our-vacation post.  (Are hyphens a good substitute for pictures?)  We're currently staying in New Hampshire with relatives and we fly home on Monday; look for a picture post sometime next week.

On Sunday, Camilla turns one.  Wow.  More about that after the fact.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about something else.

A few of you guessed, correctly, that the friends whom we were visiting earlier this week were the family of the inimitable Jen, to whom I can't link because her blog is retired.  We had a fabulous time, which was to be expected.

Jen and I "met" when she emailed me almost two years ago after stumbling across my blog.  Since then, we've had any number of phone conversations, sent countless emails, and met in person three times.  I can't name a friend with whom I made a connection more quickly than I did with her.  And yes, that was partly as a result of our circumstances at the time, but I think we'd be friends anyway.  And the funny thing is, she's about a decade older than I am.

This is an inconsequential fact, so inconsequential that I hardly ever think about it.  But on Tuesday I happened to mention to Jen how exciting it is to be able to drive the rental car now that I'm twenty-five, and she laughed.  "I forget how young you are."

Just for kicks, I checked my blogroll and there's not a single blogger on there who's younger than I am.  Some of them are just a wee bit older, but still, they're all older.  This is inconsequential as well - thankfully, this is a corner of cyberspace where age actually doesn't matter - but I find it interesting anyway.

All through grade school and high school and college, my friends were people close in age to me, with generally not more than a two-year age gap.  It made sense; we shared life circumstances and interests and activities and it worked.  Now, most of my real-life friends are still near my age, but I've made some awesome friends online who are older, and many of them, like Jen and another Jen, have turned from online friends into real-life friends.

I think it's awesome to have close friends who are older than me, not least because it makes me feel grown up.  (Hey, I'm an adult now!  Age is not so important!)  I'd have more of them if I could figure out how to get them to hang out with me.  Also younger friends, although I think it'd be a bit weird if they weren't out of high school yet.

(I am considering, however, asking any more people I meet named Jennifer if they'd mind if I referred to them by their middle names.  All these Jens makes it very confusing for my poor husband.)

Do you have friends who are more than a couple years older or younger than you?  How'd you meet, and what keeps the friendship together?