this week.

We are spending this week with a couple of David’s college roommates.  We met up in Durham at Nick and Lindsay’s house.  Joshua flew in from CA, though sadly his wife, Sarah, and son, Jacob couldn’t be with him on this trip.

We had two restful days in bright, muggy NC, exploring new playgrounds, coloring with sidewalk chalk, and cooking dinner together, before bringing Joshua back to SC with us for a visit.  He and David leave first thing tomorrow morning to rejoin the Dentels for Phil’s wedding weekend in Atlanta.  The fifth of the Palmetto house guys, John Leaf, is now living with his family in Southeast Asia.

I love old friends like this, the kind you see maybe every couple years but with whom you always pick right back up where you left off.  The kind who you can laugh with, and who you also want to spend time with when life is hard.

This is the first meeting since all of us are parents, and that makes it even more fun.  It feels a little surreal to suddenly be having conversations about dirty diapers and discipline, and exchanging looks of bewilderment in the midst of a two-year-old temper tantrum.  But it’s so fun.  I love seeing this new side to my old friends: discovering that Joshua is a pretty awesome reader of stories and Nick is delightful with his baby girl.

I’m not sure that this summer has found any of us where we expected when we graduated from college.  And there is some disappointment in that.  But there are so many gifts too. Like spouses and all these beautiful children and the fact that God knows far better than we ever could exactly what we need.