Getting Sentimental

I must be getting old. I remember the good old days when I’d be driven to pull a post together for this blog because a small child had put themselves in hospital or tried to blow the house up or something. If you’ve been following for a while you’ll have noticed something of a decline in output.

Partly it’s because life is just damn busy. Not only is it busy, but it’s rather repetitive as well. Monday to Friday is work and then the weekends tend to be a little absorbed by the 6 games of soccer, a game of netball and a game of hockey that make up our winter. Somewhere in there, Caroline is attempting to study and occasionally we think about doing outrageously wild things like cleaning the house or mowing the lawn.

Just occasionally though something gets thrown into the mix that drags us away from the ordinary.

We were lucky enough to get to go to a wedding in Bowral. The first instinct was wow, how cool would it be to go, it’s a pity that life’s too busy. The invitation sat there though and we looked at where Bowral is and wondered if perhaps there was a way to get there.. After all, we wanted to be at the wedding, it was only logistics and dollars. After all, taking four kids gets to be an interesting exercise.

After much thought and consideration, we realised that Bowral isn’t that far from Wollongong, home of our good friends the Handicotts. A plan started to come together. If we could farm out Michael and Sam, whose interest in the whole escapade really came down to whether they’d get Krispy Cremes out of a trip to Sydney, then perhaps we could get away with only bringing Thomas and Emily with us.

It worked. The Handicotts were happy to have us and kind enough to look after Tom and Em for the time that we were at the wedding and we managed to go enjoy the nuptials and all that it entailed.

I love a good wedding and I have to say that the McLloyd affair was a wedding worth being at. We had an awesome time and everything was brilliant from start to finish.

In those moments when I wasn’t listening to the priest telling everyone about sex, I had a few sentimental moments reflecting on our own wedding (so long ago) and the whole marriage experience. Add in the chance to randomly catch up with someone you knew from primary school and what more could you ask for?  Good times and good memories. The party of the reception stopped me from getting too memory laden on the night, but it’s hard to avoid it completely.

Thanks for the invite Matt and Jac, it was wonderful to be a part of it.

The fact that we also got to spend time with the Matt and Bron, who we hadn't caught up with since Caroline's 40th was an exceptionally good addition to the trip. It brought back it's own series of memories that added to the sentimental (and fun!) element of the couple of days away.

A couple of weeks after the wedding we were invited to a 50^th birthday. I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to the format of the night, I’d been told when we I needed to go there and that was sufficient information. It wasn’t really until the night that I thought to ask Caroline how it was going to work and whether we were supposed to bring anything. That’s when I found out that we’d actually be going to a sit down dinner. Not quite what I expected.

It wasn’t until we were sitting around the table as part of quite an intimate group of only about 16 people that I realised just how privileged we were to be there. Whilst spoiling us with a degustation menu of some 6 courses, Mike (the birthday boy) took us on a journey throughout the dinner of how the various guests (some of whom we’d known and some we hadn’t) had come into his life and ended up at the party.

I certainly felt like Caroline and I were the newcomers to the group which emphasized the sense of privilege that grew throughout the night.

It was a fantastic night and once again, as with the wedding, it left me thinking about a whole range of things, about how fortunate I’ve been in my life, the friends that I’ve accumulated and the journey that I’ve taken.

Clearly it’s a sign that I’m getting older myself. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that after a wedding or big party all I was left with was a big hangover and an absence of memories!