Feeding Babies & Telling Stories

A person finds joy in giving an apt reply—and how good is a timely word!

—Proverbs 15:23

When Henry was a baby, he and I flew to visit friends in California. There were four college girlfriends with three baby boys under eight months old in a two-bedroom house for three days.

We couldn’t get all of us and the car seats in one car, so we walked everywhere with our strollers, to get ice cream and coffee and the best Chinese takeout I’ve ever had. One afternoon Kirsten roasted a chicken and some kale—crispy, almost nutty—and we sat on a blanket in the backyard in the sun, letting the boys roll around, telling the same college stories we’ve told and heard five hundred times. We rotated from the kitchen to the sunny backyard, to the front porch to the fluffy rug in the living room, feeding babies and telling stories.

We laid on the blanket under the lemon tree drinking Sancerre while the babies napped, and I realized why this kind of time together matters: because there are things you can’t know, and questions you can’t ask, and memories you can’t recover via e-mail and voicemail. It was about being there to really see what’s exactly the same and what’s totally different about each one of us.