The Picture of the Family Will Be Altered...Forever!!!

I promised an update of the birthday party, but that is just going to have to wait. Who can talk wild animal games and crocodile cakes when there is something completely mind-blowing like this to discuss?

In September you may recall that one of my dearest real-life friends and way funny and thoughtful blogger, Angela (aka "Ant Chla" as my little bro called her), posted a fabulous tribute to me for my birthday.

Amongst all the strokes to my vanity and very cool memories that she shared, she mentioned a phenom in our friendship that I now like to call the "Marlin-Dory Relationship Continuum." You know the part in Finding Nemo right after Marlin and Dory meet and he is madly following her because he thinks she knows the way to the boat that scooped up Nemo? And then she suddenly turns on him and says, "What? You wanna piece a me? Huh? This ocean's not big enough or something?"

OK, it's not exactly like that, because I've never turned on Angela, but she does follow me a lot and she gives me credit for being much more "with it" than I am, because I am more like Dory than I would like to admit. (Ask my husband - I have absolutely no a very sketchy memory of our first kiss. Sad. And he still married me.)

But anyway, years ago we noticed this whole pattern of doing all the same things in life within 6-12 months of each other. This is roughly how it went: (Keep in mind that this is vital information for your future and ours...)

September 1974: I was born, then 10 and a half months later, she was.

September 1992: I started my freshman year at a Ricks (Forever!) College and 12 months later, she did. Our friendship began when we moved into a house we shared with six other girls.

We cried buckets of tears at having to go our separate ways 8 months later, frantic that our paths would never cross again...and we started a late night phone call binge and letter-writing correspondence over the next few months. (This was before e-mail, people. Can you imagine?)

October 1994: I visited Angela in Missouri for a 10-day slumber party. Among other things I went to Wichita with her parents and picked a fight with her 6'6" brother over Nilla Wafers that we had bought to make banana cream pie. He ate them! All! Without asking! If I'd a had a sling shot...

April 1995: (six months later) She came to DC to visit me. And we pretty much decided that we needed to get together every six months. At least.

November 1995: I left on a mission to the Ukraine. (after making fun of a roommate for learning such a useless language as Russian, there I was...hmmm....learning Russian. And finding it quite useful. Divine retribution.) There went our six month plan. But luckily we were in good letter writing habit by then. Angela was not going to go on a mission. Ever.

August 1996:(9 months later) Angela got her little piece of divine retribution and was called to serve a mission in Utah. (What was that you said when you were fifteen about the possibility of serving a mission there?!) Just for the record, I'll take freezing nose hairs and not understanding anything that's said to me for months on end before I could endure 250 women confined to ten acres. So our penance for catty remarks were perfectly suited to each of us.

October 1997: I enrolled at Utah State University - based on Angela's mention of it in a letter once...and the hives that I broke out into at the thought of attending BYU - sorry cougar people, but I just could not fathom...

Five months later, Angela was at USU, too. (She had planned all along to go there, so it was really me that followed her, even though I got there a few months earlier.)

Spring 1999: I graduated from USU, and 12 months later, Angela did, too. GO AGGIES!

January 2000: I moved into a studio apartment in downtown SLC and went to work in the real world. Loved the independence and solitude except for the time I caught my finger in a LOCKED car door while holding a basket of laundry and the keys were in the opposite pocket and when I saw my flat finger after finally getting it out, I just wanted my mommy. Angela (a much more social creature) thought I was crazy to live alone.

12 months later, she got herself a studio and enjoyed the riotous single living for a bit as well...because Riotous is our middle name, you know.

May 2001: I finally realized David had me at hello and we got married. Angela liked my wedding so much that 10 months later she asked me to work up a good reception for her, too, and her J really liked that I made sure he had treats while he stood in the reception line and that I booted them out while the night was still young...

December 2002: My first baby, a boy, was born, and less than six months later, Angela's first baby boy, Benja, came along.

July 2004: My second baby boy was born. I could have sworn I was having a girl, but it was really a boy. And what a boy! Then nine months later, Angela THOUGHT she was having a boy, but it was really a girl. And BOY, what a girl!

So, between developmental milestones of our babies and career milestones of our husbands and emotional milestones of being friends, Angela and I have enjoyed more than a decade of tag teaming, advice giving and consoling because one or the other of us has pretty recently "been there."

But you should know that all of that is about to change dramatically. And not just for Angela and me, either...

We have just concurred on a startling new development that may indicate an impending collision of the space-time continuum and it could have earth-shattering, life-altering consequences for everyone who knows us, even just our cyber buddies. And most likely anyone we have met in real life.

Something BIG - and we mean something REALLY big - is most certainly about to happen, because Ant Chla and I are breaking the 6-12 months rule that has thus far governed our friendship's existence. Not since the school year of 1993-94 have we done something like this at the EXACT same time!!!

All we're saying is maybe you all should get your food storage in order, line out your wills, build your bomb shelters and map out your escape-from-earth routes, because not only are we posting eerily similar posts on the same day, but Angela and I are both having our third babies six months from now!!!!

If that doesn't have you concerned about the state of life as we know it, consider that these two third babies from different moms, born within mere DAYS of each other (instead of the requisite six to twelve months apart), will also have birthdays almost exactly THIRTEEN months after TomKat's baby Suri. (**Cue Twilight Zone theme music**)

All I know is that when garbanzo beans are my new chocolate and heartburn and sciatica arrive about six months ahead of past experience, there is something bigger than all of us happening here.

Furthermore, Frog Eye Salad, aka Carrot Jell-o, is also implicated in this conspiracy, because not only is she having a baby about the same time, but she was the first to suggest my impending pregnancy on my blog, and how could she have known I had just done a Clear Blue a week or two before? AND, it was one day after reading this post of hers that I had an unprecedented and very unfortunate experience in WalMart. (Just subtract the store clerk and plastic bag from her story and add a 2-year-old climbing madly out of the cart and a 3-year-old coming back from the toy aisle and very loudly exclaiming, "What the...?!!!?" and you've got mine...)

Just don't ever say that we didn't warn you. And beware of pregnant women everywhere. They, too, may unwittingly be part of this vast operative of forever changing the world as we know it.