Scouting and scheming

I started paying a lot of attention to Christmas newsletters my senior year. I'd toss aside the ones where the kids were too little or too old and instead look at the ones with kids my age.

"So-and-so is hoping to attend BYU in the fall." I would store so-and-so's name in my brain and hope to meet him/her (okay, I cared more about the "him"s . . . I was a teenage girl, after all) in a few months at BYU. By the time school rolled around, I had forgotten most of the names but still thought it would be awesome if I became friends with my parents' friends' kids.

And as a matter of fact, I met at least 3 of them. The first one was my RA Jennae (Rah-jennae, we called her). She was in the RA office the day I moved in. My dad saw her and said out of the blue, "Are you [her mom's name]'s daughter?" She was, and we always enjoyed having the family newsletter connection.

The second connection came my sophomore year. When I was in high school, my dad had had a picnic with some of his high school friends and I got to know their kids that night. So when I recognized Kyle's name in some Facebook group, I think I added him and we ended up being pretty good friends for the rest of that year.

The third connection came at a bridal shower for one of my high school friends who was also at BYU and getting married the week after me. She had invited a girl named Kate and I got to know her a little bit during the bridal shower. Imagine my surprise when 2 weeks later Kate showed up with her parents at my reception!

"I was at home and saw your face on the fridge!" she explained. Turns out her mom was one of my dad's friends from high school and so they had received my wedding announcement. And I think we had actually played together when we were little and had just totally forgotten.

Why do I bring these up? Because I have all these friends having babies and my reaction every time I hear the sex of the baby is either, "Oh! He's going to be Joseph's best friend at college!" or "Oh! She's going to marry Joseph someday!" (But then I have to think, "Well, she's going to be born in December, so she'll be a year behind at school, but with missions, they might meet up . . .") And I'm sure my parents felt the same way  twenty some odd years ago with their friends' kids. Maybe?

Of course, if social networking makes yearly newsletters obsolete, then kids won't have that chance to scout out their future friends the way I did. But a future mother-in-law can still dream. :)