Hangin' With My Peeps

So, I had lunch with my peeps yesterday. Maybe someone in their 50's shouldn't try to use slang like this, but I'm still cool. Or at least, I think I am. My daughter would not agree that I am cool by any stretch of the imagination. And when I say peeps, all I can really think of is that peep research web site that cracks me up every time I see it. Whew, enough links. I'm stressing myself out. And losing my train of thought. But that train gets derailed pretty often.

Anyway. I have lunch every month or so with my sister-in-law and our daughters. Often my mom comes and my sister when she is in town. We started this a couple of years ago so we could see other on a regular basis. I named it the SISters group, since we are sisters in spirit, even though we are all not real sisters. You know how they say you can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family? Well, I'm really lucky because I would choose these people for friends every time.

I am getting to the point here. I just had to have some build up. My sister-in-law and I have always been close. We have always lived physically close to each other and have been emotionally close, well, forever. I had one daughter and my sister-in-law (that crazy thing!) had three, so the four girls are as close as cousins can get. My husband and I also had a son, who we adore. But this post is about the girls. We took the kids everywhere when they were little. We basically had no money, so we took a picnic lunch and headed to the pool, the park, each other's house. We sat by the pool, chatting and counting the little seal-dark heads every few minutes. We took them to feed the ducks and pushed them on the swings and watched them grow. We took them to preschool together and watched them grow. We shopped for them at garage sales, let them play dress-up and watched them grow up. We enjoyed our children. We loved them. We experienced everything through their eyes.

What we never once thought about was that they would eventually grow up into women. Women we like, we admire, we enjoy spending time with. Both of us would rather do something with our daughters than with anyone else. None of them would consider moving anywhere that would be away from us. None would consider making a major decision without talking to us. Each of them calls us first when they have something to cry about or something to laugh about or something to celebrate.

We did the best we could with what we had. That meant no money but a whole lot of love.

Apparently, that was just the right combination. They are all wonderful women.