BFF's Part Deux

In all the baby excitement of this past week, I didn't get an opportunity to post about another exciting event - meeting up with two of my Blog Friends, the mommanista and Curiosity Killer! It was a great girls' lunch date - would have been better if other buddies (both blog and in person gal pals) Dina and Danielle and blogsister Chrissy could have made it too. But Chrissy's a bit far on the Island, and the others have one-year olds, which can be a challenge at lunch time. I brought along my rugrats, who were fairly well-behaved. For Liam, have Nintendo DS, will travel; little G was napping at first, then woke up but didn't eat anything except her requisite milk. CK spoiled us with the lovely biscuits she brought all the way over from Hong Kong.

I feel like I've known these girls forever even though it's only this year that we've been communicating through blogging; ironically through cyberspace, certain walls come down and I feel compelled to share things that in real-time would likely take years to divulge. It was a bit of a challenge to explain to Liam who these ladies were and how it was that I met them through blogging. I'm trying to be so careful these days with him because he is at the age where he's interested in e:mailing and playing online games. And I don't want him getting into the whole "chatroom" phenomenon. But then, I had already met girlfriends in these ladies' network on "mommydates" so I felt they weren't exactly strangers.

I suppose I've always had an interest in meeting other people through the written word. When I was in 6th grade, I started writing to penpals, and at one point had about a dozen of them. I had a few in England, a few in the U.S. and western Canada, Japan (always got the cutest stationary from them, and was first exposed to Hello Kitty way back then); a couple in South America. I corresponded with my very first penpal until we were in our late teens. I always thought it would be neat to meet a penpal and actually did the one time when I was 16. It was a fellow from the UK who was visiting friends in Toronto - he was about 19, and my parents were nice enough to have him over for dinner. It was the first I'd ever seen anyone drink a WARM beer. He was nice enough, but we sort of lost touch after that visit. The one penpal I regret not meeting in person was a fellow from Sao Paolo, Brazil. I remember he sent me a really pretty bracelet, and I almost flipped when he sent me his photo. He was over-the-moon cute, and at around 14 years of age, that was a major priority for me.

But gal-pals are definitely safer. The mommanista and I had already had a shopping date back in spring with our little girls (fantastic; she is an amazing shopper!). CK is a pal all the way from Hong Kong; who according to Liam "didn't have any accent - her English is pretty good Mom!". He didn't realize that CK pretty much grew up in Toronto and NYC! It was so nice to get together face to face, have some laughs and get to know each other better in person.

So, I was a good girl and brought my camera - but in my haste left the memory card at home! Not as professional as my friends who had their blogging hardware handy. Photos were of course taken, by my budding photographer L-boy - so I'll have to rely on my BFF's to blog on their spaces so I can link-ya over there for the proof!

* Blog Friends Forever