on friendship

if you know me very well, you know that i love meeting new people and hanging out with friends. james and i often talk about what we want our home to look and feel like. more than anything, we desire for our home to be a comfortable place where everyone always feels welcome to hangout. i'm sure we can all think back to our childhood and remember that one friend whose house you always loved hanging out at, and james and i want our home to be that place. part of the reason we purchased the house we did was because living room, dining room, and kitchen are so open. who knows how long we will live here, but i hope our kids love inviting their friends to our home, and i'm going to try my best to always have good snacks and food in the fridge :).

anyway, i met some new friends a couple of weeks ago--austin and hailey. we were all introduced at the gym by my friend from work, avery, and it is crazy how much i've seen them since that initial meeting. not only do james and i see them virtually every day at the gym, but last week i also saw them at james at the mill for the fast 15, the summit lunch at pinnacle church, at the 9:30 service at fellowship today. that's like 8 times of seeing new friends in one week--creepy! (although i guess this is nwa and it's not really as big as i think it is). today i also received facebook friend requests from them and i'm sure soon we'll all actually plan to get together sometime in the near future. in the mean time, i love thinking about how and why we become friends with certain people.

as we get older and friends change based on location, stages of life, and personalities, it is nice to have friends we can always count on while meeting new people who enrich our life in the here and now. some other people i've really enjoyed this semester are the women in our small group. all of them are older than me (brandi actually went to jbu, but graduated before i got there), and james and i purposely chose the group because we wanted to learn from others' experiences, especially with parenting. a few of the lovely ladies in the group actually surprised me with baby gifts today, which made our day even sweeter.

kaye, the girl on the far left, wrote us a sweet card that says, "james and silvy, we are very excited for you guys! your kid is for sure going to have the "cool parents!" we have really enjoyed getting to know you guys over the past few months. we really hope that God continues to bless you & guide you through being new parents. we like you guys a lot and are blessed that we get to know you! congrats!" ~ryan and kaye.

i don't know if we'll be the "cool parents" or "fun parents" (actually sometimes i really despise these labels), but i do know that we are both very laid back people and i hope that our friends and children's friends always enjoying coming to our house. i'm sure our house will be a mad house at times, but i know it will also be a home of deep love. i'm getting pretty excited about this whole parenting thing...