When I went off to college as an impressionable, uncertain 17-year old, God was so good to put me in a dorm smack dab in the middle of some amazing girls.

We became quick and necessary friends. The hallmark of our group was our obnoxious use of the term “dawg”. I say obnoxious because we didn’t just say it as an occasional pronoun; we said it incessantly.

Then the Baja Men released “Who Let the Dogs Out” the fall of our freshman year and that timing is just too good to be true.

This is Amanda, Jorie, Amanda, Kate and Alli. Since there were two Amandas, we went by our last names: GOB dawg, Jorie Dawg, Sooth Dawg, Kate Dawg and Alli Dawg. GOB’s laughing because right before taking this picture, the waiter chastised her for eating Jorie’s birthday sundae.

These girls are the best neighbors I’ve ever had. We lived in West AJ for two years and went through a lot together. College is hard. There are tests and boys and lots of growing up to do. These girls introduced me to hair gel and Rugged Wearhouse and pumpkin blizzards at Dairy Queen (though I always got Snickers. I’m not fooled by you, pumpkin). We went to frat parties, waited up all night for football tickets, and  watched the Twin Towers fall together.

And we ate at Macado’s. A lot.

We had two things on our minds at all times: getting a husband and having babies.

It’s all we talked about.

Almost every day one of the dawgs come into my dorm and say, “Sooth-dawg. I think I met my husband today.” And I’d reply, “Dawg! That’s great news! Now you can start naming your babies!”

In other words, we were every college guy’s worst nightmare.

Seven years later and we’ve landed some husbands…

(Sorry, Kate, I couldn’t find your wedding photo) 

…and had some babies.

Baby boys, to be exact. There’s Brady, 2, Connor, 9 months, David, 3 months, and Max, 2 months.

We had a partial-dawg reunion last week in Fredericksburg to introduce all the babies. 

Moments after we arrived the living room looked like an explosion of baby boys and plastic toys.

This is Connor (he’s not so out of focus in real life). That’s a remote control in his hand. The living room was literally strewn from one end to the other with toys and what does Connor have? The remote control. How do babies know?

It’s so good to catch up with old friends. This was my first time trying to do so in a room full of babies. It’s sort of like going on Facebook to just check one thing. Five minutes later you’ve looked at vacation pictures from high school friends, wished five people a happy birthday and updated your status twice. And forgotten that one thing you wanted to check. I’ve never had so many half-conversations in my life.

It didn’t help that David cried most of the time. I spent most of the time frantically nursing, changing diapers and dreaming about the day when I can just put him down and give him a remote control already! 

This is Kate, with Alli’s new baby, Max.

As we were getting ready to leave, David was screaming and I couldn’t find our lens cap. Even though I know Tom would be more upset if I came home without the lens cap than if I came home without the baby, I decided we just needed to GO.

Alli took David so I could do one more frantic search and guess what? She’s super-mom. David stopped crying.

And HUZZAH! I found the lens cap.

I’m convinced that the biggest change in the past seven years isn’t all the babies…it’s that we hardly ever say dawg anymore, dawg.

Share this:

Facebook

0

Twitter

Pinterest

0

email