Superman and Green Lantern

The last few weeks the kids have been very happy to have a hairy, loud dude living in our garage.  He read them fun stories, sang awesome good-night songs and played new and super cool games.  Sometimes Emily would slip up and call him "uncle".  After the kids were in bed this guy would stay up with their parents drinking and chatting and occasionally watching movies.  In no way was this weird to the kids because they were unaware that a lifetime ago this guy used to date their mom.

This culmination of years of "friendship kindling" through online chats and lots of music sharing was weird in lots of spots but wonderful in lots of other ones.   For anyone concerned that this might be weird for Keith, it was not.  He, in fact, said he felt left out because he was the only one this wasn't weird for (apart from the kids).  Self-assurance is not an area of personal growth for Keith.  He was ecstatic because he had always wanted to be better friends with Devin because they have a lot of similar interests so this trip was great.  Plus there was the added benefit of having another adult during some of his days alone with the kids, including the day they all went to the zoo where the helpful lady at the ticket counter told Cian "Yes you can have a map that way you can help your dads find where all the animals are!"  (kudos to you zoo lady for being LGBT friendly to people even if they aren't LGBT).

I thought that my friendship with Devin stemmed from my unbelievable tenacity (and that was a large part of it he said) but truthfully, I agree with Devin, we are friends because of Cian.  Oh that kiddo is magical in lots of ways and forming new friendships for his parents is just one of them.  Who would have thought that the only Speech Pathologist I knew would have a weird back-story in my life and be a superhero to my kid.  That all the things I think are cool about Devin are the things they think are awesome too.  (Except for musical tastes I think they are still firmly in love with rock and roll and musical soundtracks respectively.  Although they did like a lot of Devin's stuff too.)

It's weird to have such a familiarity with someone and not have spent a lot of time with them in the past decade.  It's also kind of awesome though to discover the old ruins of a previous relationship, softened with time, and fill it up with laughter and music, 4 am adventures, funk dance parties and movies and snacks.  Sometimes moving past the awkward gets you somewhere awesome.

Kilowog!