People (usually people with older kids) always say to enjoy every minute with your kids because they’re gone before you know it.  I’m not yet at the point where I look at my kids and think, “Wow!  That went by fast!”  (I’m usually thinking, “How much longer is this phase going to last?”)

I do notice time flying when I look at other peoples’ kids though.  If my friends’ kids are maturing, I must be getting O-L-D.  I’ve got to stop looking at my friends’ kids.

Today was a one-two punch of looking middle age right in the face.  My next post will show the other “where did the time go” event, but this post is dedicated to our friends and neighbors, Leah, Nikki, and their mom, Nancy.

Nikki is the knockout in the prom dress, and Leah is the soccer star beside her.  My kids idolize those two girls, and I can’t think of better role models for them to look up to.

Tonight was Junior Cotillion for FHS, and as I stood in the back yard listening to Nikki talking about who was going with who, and who lied to their parents because their date didn’t meet their criteria, and whose parents wouldn’t buy a dress unless their daughter went with a boy (rather than with friends), and who was sleeping over at the girl-boy sleepover tonight (Nikki’s not), I was having flash-backs to 1999, when we bought our house.     

We weren’t married and we didn’t have kids yet.  Nikki was about 6 years old and Leah was a baby.  Leah didn’t give us too much trouble the first few years, but I clearly remember Nikki standing on her deck watching us eat on our back porch (“Hi! Hi! Hi!”), and then there was the pogo stick incident.

I woke up one Saturday morning to the sound of Nikki jumping on her pogo stick in the driveway (on the same side of the house as our bedroom) and counting each jump.  When she got to 72 she fell off and ran to report the record number of jumps to her dad.  As I got ready to head back to LaLa-Land I heard her father say, “Great!  Let’s see if you can get to 100!”  boing-boing-boing-boing-boing-boing     :~0

I don’t have any photos of Nikki and Leah from when we first moved in, but here’s a flashback to the summer of 2002, when Aliya was about 9 months old.  Time flies.