Thanksgiving

Good morning,

It's funny that you should mention the BLU concept. Last weekend, K had a friend visiting form Chicago who spent Saturday night with us, watching baseball and hanging out. When they left, K told me, she said "It's like Thanksgiving." I took that as such an endearing compliment.

I'm not really sure how it got this way, and I'm not convinced it was all due to the kids, either. Our whole neighborhood, within this two block radius, is very close, as neighbors. We're very protective of our community, very much of a village in that sense. Not all of us socialize regularly, but always take time for a long chat on the driveway or at a holiday party. Every one of us knows we could call anyone on this block for help in an emergency, whether that's a hurt kid or not enough chairs for a poker party.

On our corner, as it is in other little patches of the block, it's even closer. T&S have become so much like family for us that sometimes I forget they actually aren't. If C weren't old enough to be our boys' guardian, we would have asked them, not my own brother. K&R only came into the picture a few years ago and J has become very close with R - they think alike, they work alike, they have very similar jobs, they're both complete workaholics. T balances them out, I think, with his half-truck-driver-half-stay-home-dad career. The thing is, the six of us just get along. All the time. There aren't any pretensions or expectations. None of us come from particularly functional families so I think that has a lot to do with it. We've created our own version of one that works for us.

T and I both are hyper-social and love to just have everyone together, whenever, for any reason or none; K loves to cook - anything, any time; J and R are happy to show up and be waited on. :) Sometimes I think S tires of it all; she's much more reserved, less of a party person. Sometimes we have to back off and give her hibernation space.

It probably sounds weird to some. Like a commune. And we do laugh at ourselves, although I think we feel fortunate. Many people tell us we're lucky to raise our kids this way (with that I can't argue). I feel lucky to have eight or ten or however many people around my dinner table as often as I do, when all the years I was growing up, all I wanted was a large family.

I'm sort of laughing as I write, thinking of much fodder for crazy this morning. My living room right now, at 9:10 in the morning, is loud with Playstation and yelling and arguing and laughter, because it's late start Wednesday, and why don't we all hang out at A's until the bus comes? What would JJ do without us all?

Love my life,
A