Hashtag Squad Goals

My summer is quickly drawing to a close and I can feel it slipping away!  NOOOOOOO!!!!!  I have been back to work this week to work on getting the new year planned and on getting my classroom ready.  I’ll post pictures when it is finished.  It’s been nice to be back, but after two months of wearing pajamas and reading books all day, it’s exhausting to be productive for hours at a time! It has required happy hours with my sweetheart to help me survive.

Last weekend, in one last hurrah before school begins and summer drifts away, we got together with some friends to swim, eat, and play together.

Way back when Gracie was a wee little infant, she began making friends with these crazy ladies.

Pretty much every fun milestone in Gracie’s life has been marked with these girls. And as their friendships grew stronger with each birthday party, tea party, playdate, and field trip, Chris and I got to know their families better and better, too. And they have become such a fun group of people to spend lazy afternoons with while our kids terrorize our houses and flail around in our pools.

(Side note: At the last party we all had, the parents had a diving competition off of the diving board. Bennet, seen here hanging upside down in a towering attempt to join our Olympic gymnast team, got this great idea to put a baby float out in the middle of the pool and see which adult could dive through this tiny float without getting stuck. I wish I had a picture because you won’t believe me, but we ALL made it through that float and IT. WAS. AWESOME.)

As we finish up our back to school shopping and get ready for having TWO kids in elementary school (WHAT?!), it kind of saddens me that each of Gracie’s girlfriends will be moving on to different elementary schools.

I know Gracie will make all kinds of wonderful new friends, and I’m really excited about that for her. But I don’t know if any group of friends will be more fun than this wacky bunch of hooligans.

If I could give advice to any new parent, it might be this: Make friends with the parents of your kid’s friends. And I mean real friends. The kind of friends you list as the emergency contact on paperwork. The kind of friends who don’t care if you forget to bring a snack to share at a potluck. The kind of friends who can watch your kids for you when your babysitter cancels at the last minute. It takes time to form those friendships, but they are worth it because these are the people who become your village as you raise your babies into little people. And having a strong, fun village is good for the whole family.

We have already made plans to get together the first weekend after the first week of school for everyone, just to check in and hear about how the week went. And I am sure that we will continue to get together in the years to come. I know more friends will be added to the mix, as our kids go out and make more friends. And that will be great. The more the merrier. But I will miss these sweet afternoons with our preschoolers and their crazy, fun, wonderful families.