As if we didn’t have enough going on during those last couple weeks of March, one day we got a call from our friend Kimberly to say that she and Mark and the kids would be in town and would love to get together with us one evening if we could manage it. If it had been someone else I might have told them regretfully that we were so busy we couldn’t squeeze them in, because even though we were having fun with Brenda & Bug and meeting blog friends and visiting with family, by that point I was tired.

But for Mark & Kimberly and their kids, I was glad to drink an extra latte and make a couple of pans of lasagna! For one thing, we had not seen them in almost five years, which is just unbelievable. For another, Mark & Kimberly are pretty much framily. (You know, the kind of friends who are like family but without the baggage.)

Troy and Kimberly were good friends in college, where they were in the same Navy ROTC unit and many of the same computer-science classes. Kimberly graduated a year before Troy and was already working on a Navy ship when we got married. When we drove out to San Diego as newlyweds to look for our first home, we spent a week sleeping on Mark & Kimberly’s living-room futon in their tiny Point Loma apartment. For the next two years, we hung out with them a lot.

We went to Sea World and played miniature golf together. We had cookouts on the beach and cooked each other Thanksgiving and Easter dinners. We hiked and swam and went out to eat and carved jack-o-lanterns and talked and laughed and even studied together on occasion. Their first baby, Theodore, was born right before Troy left on the first six-month deployment of our marriage, and I probably spent more time with him in the next six months than anyone except his parents. (Now that baby is almost as tall as me and about to enter junior high.) We had other acquaintances and co-workers in San Diego, but Mark and Kimberly were our only good friends. I’d even venture to say they were great friends.

The last time we saw them was when we stopped for a visit in their town as we were moving from Arizona to Maryland when Annalie was a year old. The first time Annalie slept all the way through the night EVER was when we were visiting them, actually. Their daughter Lillian was almost 3 at the time and had just started her first ballet class. Theodore was only a little older than Annalie is now!

I’m not sure how we managed to let so much time go by between visits because we had just as much fun with them as we always do. And we really enjoyed getting to meet the newest addition to their family, Marcio, too. Even though I was tired, even though it was the 17th visit in a row, I’m so glad they happened to be in town and stopped by! I’m already looking forward to the next visit, which I’m hoping we can squeeze in before Theodore gets his driver’s license.