Family of Friends

Family: it has always been a prevalent force in my life. I realized at a young age what traditions were held dear to my family, what could easily be overlooked, and what I wish we spent more time with. Growing up there were two major holidays that defined my family, Christmas and Fourth of July. With those two days of the year my maternal family would gather together, eat good food, give each other trouble, and not see each other for another 6 months. My paternal family is small, as my dad is an only child and we would see that family for holidays and birthdays on regular bases, but nothing to extravagant, nonetheless traditional.

When I got to the point in my life when family members started to pass on, leave us, or create new families of there own I reevaluated my expectations. Michael and I have always known that we want a large family; partly because we both value how valuable traditions and relationships are and the other part because we never really had a big family ourselves. So we start planning: how many kids, what kind of traditions we will instill, how important certain events will be, all of the planning can go without a hitch but if you’re trying to build something from the ground up it takes a lot of work with small foundations (little families, uninterested family members, etc.).

After the past few weekends with all the amazing friends gathering around to help celebrate the impending birth of our daughter Michael and I started to realize our foundations aren’t as small as we might think they are. At first glance one would see this baby as having a rather small extended family. But pulling back the layers and looking closer you will start to see she’s going to have numerous “aunts and uncle”. The people whom we would trust her life with honestly surpasses the number of fingers and toes I have.

We don’t have a small foundation we’re working with here, we have one of the largest, most loving, amazing situations we could possibly ask for. Our friends truly make up our family. I don’t sit there, at my showers, counting the number of family members I wish were there, I sit there counting the blessings of each of the people who are truly there for us.