If you are going to have kids at the same time as your best friend it will initially be kind of awesome.
Or, rather, as awesome as things can be when two sleep deprived people get together with hungry, crying infants on their own separate sleep schedules. So, basically, just like being at home except that when you are still in your pajamas at eleven in the morning covered in milk stains and spit up, your company will smell just like you.
Eventually the time will come when you get talking, walking kids together. When that happens you can watch the remaining awesome dissipate like mist in the sun as the first kid declares, “Mine!”
As we are now painfully aware, one and two year olds mostly just horde toys and fight. So a “fun” weekend together will in actuality turn out to be exhausting weekends of parallel parenting while refereeing wrestling matches over the toy of the moment. Of course this stage is relatively short lived but, if you do it like my best friend and I did, just as one starts getting out of the wrestling match stage another new kid shows up until you suddenly look at each other and wonder how you produced six kids when the oldest is only four.
But I’ve got good news. If you can just hold on, through the insanity, the lack of sleep, and the toy wars, in just a few short years (nine short years to be exact) the kids will grow up enough that the biggest problem is that no matter how many plates of food you serve, as soon as the food is put away, one of them will show back up in the kitchen proclaiming, “I’m hungry!”
My friend and I… we seem to have made it out the other side. This spring we got together for multiple days of actual, real life, fun.
Yes, dinner time was hectic and there was still plenty of refereeing to be done. But at the end of the day we put the kids to bed early and fell back into our old habits of staying up too late laughing until we cried.
If you are going to have kids at the same time as your best friend, initially it will be kind of awesome.
And then it won’t.
But don’t give up, best friends can always make it back to awesome, eventually…
Of course those friends might not have a picture of themselves taken together since those first kidos were born, but I’m sure that’s just part of the awesome that is yet to come!
Behind the Willows 
I love this big much! It is so true. The awesomeness is back, just like we always thought 😉 …
Yup! 🙂 (And sorry about your eyes in the first picture. I would have used something else but this was all I had and besides I think it quite accurately portrays both the pajamas and the sleep deprivation! 😉 )
Comes the day when your children are 50, 45, 43, 42, 40, and 34 — and you call and say “Let’s have one last crazy adventure together.” It will still be awesome. Hints: learn conversational Spanish, do NOT accept an invitation to do tequila shots, and set aside enough money for bail.
Jerry is SO right. And the best part of adventuring with your long-time besties? You can blog it! (And maybe turn that into a self-pub Kindle best-seller–esp if pajamas and sleep deprivation are still involved…) But you should still bring bail money…
You guys are full of good advice! Now, for more practical advice can you tell us how to explain the need for bail money to the spouses? 😉
Once again, wonderful, Jessie!
Thank you Helen! 🙂
i don’t think you ladies ever left awesome! xo
🙂 Maybe we were just on the lowish side of awesome when we got together the last few years. 🙂
Very sweet and true! Miss you both and hope all is going well for both of you guys!
Hey Pam! Thanks for stopping by here, I hope things are going great with your family as well!
What an awesome testimony to friendship and motherhood!!
It’s been a pretty good so far! 🙂
Haha, loved this! I have no doubt you’re both awesome x
We like to think so! 😉
I love this! I didn’t have kids at the same time as my best friend (she beat me to it by a few years) but I made new friends when I moved into this building when Lilly was a few months old and somehow all the new friends I made had kids below 1! At this point there’s 4 of us with kids around the same age and were in the ‘mine!’ Stage 😑 Where previously it was awesome, now our get together are more about keeping our kids from killing each other than relaxing afternoons 😂 I hope we grow out of this stage soon! Though I’m sure by than some or all of us will have more kids to continue the cycle 😬
The “mine” stage is not a fun stage that’s for sure! I hope you guys all make it out the other side of it! 😉
I hope so too!