I heart my family.

So, right now I'm at home, just relaxing and spending time with my family. (So, this should indicate to you that this this is not going to be a feministing post *sorry*)

Last night, we took out pretty much all of the photo albums from about the time that Sarah and I were 5-12. These pictures and talking about memories of the past was really fun, but surprisingly made me feel incredibly sad that we weren't still kids together.

Mine and my sister's life, for the first 10 years at least, consisted of playing together pretty much every day, and we had no other cares in the world. Then we got Candy and it became pretty much the three of us all the time. Candy is present in every event in our life, and now I look at the pictures of our childhood, and they truly seem like a time so far passed, and it's really quite depressing. While Sarah and I were looking at the pictures, I wished I could still be that young, where life was so simple, but now I'm starting to think about things, and how now I'm the same age as my mother was when I was born- it's funny how my life now seems to be overlapping with that of my mother's, and it scares me *a little* that now I'm the same age as my mother was when she was married and had given birth to her first child.

Now that Candy has died, it seems as though a phase of our life has ended, and now Sarah and I have to truly face the fact that we are becoming adults, and that we have to leave our childhood behind.

I keep thinking about the way things are changing, and its making me really sad. I mostly think that it is the death of my dog that is really causing me to reflect so deeply on the way that life is changing, but I can't help it. Being an adult, and turning 24 and losing Candy is really, really, causing me to reflect on both the past and the future, how everything had changed, and how it will all continue to change at such a seemingly fast and unstoppable rate.

Next year, Sarah will probably move to London with her boyfriend, and who knows where I will be? This will be the end of another stage of life, the one which we spent living together all the time- we've lived together all of our lives except for 3, and those 3 years we spent together at the same school. It will be sad to be an hour or two hours away from each other permanently, but we have at least one more year together, there is no guarantee that we will be going our separate ways at the end of the year, but it is a possibility that makes me sad.

I am just feeling so thankful for the family that I have and never want to move too far away from them. I have essentially "become" my mother as they say daughters often do, but I'm ok with it. Sarah has turned out to be like my father, myself like my mother, and we spend so much time laughing about it, it's just become a running joke.

But, more than a joke, I'm glad that we've all spent so much time together and grown to be like each other; I don't know why though, I just really love my family. I miss my childhood, but more than that, I'm glad that we sit around the dinner table for 2 hours and drink wine while we make jokes, talk about memories, and all around have a great time. My favorite part of my family is our dinners. Our dinners have become more than just a "fuel up" and now have become the central part of our family time. Literally, dinner is at least an hour, sometimes two, and I wouldn't change it for anything. We talked about food a lot in my "Bodies, Gender and Consumption" class, and my prof made a comment about the way in which awkward gatherings can be almost magically changed once food is introduced into the mix. In my European family, dinner is central. We have had family dinner from the very beginning, and it used to be *obligatory* especially in those teenage years, but our dinners have evolved to be the background setting for all of our conversations, debates, laughs and cries.

With the possibility that Sarah and I may no longer live together in a couple years, I am especially happy that (if I'm in the GTA and she's in London) we will have dinner together every second Saturday (at least) and that we will always have 50's summers together. (50's summers are the summers where we will go camping for whole summers with our kids while our husbands stay in the city and work and come up on weekends)

These 50's summers are the exact same summers that Sarah and I had for 10 years, and they were certainly the best summers we ever had as children, and we hope to do the same thing with our kids someday, so that we can give them those awesome experiences to remember forever. 50's summers were amazing, and to write about 50s summers would literally be an entirely separate post. I mean, as a feminist why would I want to have 50's summers in my adulthood? It's because my life was so shaped positively by those 50's summers, and they are nothing but happy memories. I honestly want to spend a lot of time with my kids someday, because I want to be able to give them everything my parents gave me, which was most importantly my sister, my dog, themselves, 50s summers, and family dinners where the wine flows freely. Candy is no longer with us, and we have outgrown 50s summers, but I love them so much, and they gave us the happiest memories I have in my life that I look forward to giving those 50's summers to my kids.

That is all. I heart my family. I'm glad that we're here this weekend together.