13 Candles

Syd and Dev met when they were one and a half…and Donna and I, their moms, met some time after.

How did they meet first? Their babysitters introduced them at the park. Donna and I were/are “working moms”…and I guess you could then say…our little girls introduced us.

Since then, and for the last eleven and a half years, we’ve all been growing up together. The girls, physically and mentally…and me and Donna have been trying to keep it to the mental part. We are both petite in stature and 5 pounds make a pants size and ten pounds would put us in moo-moos.

So, while our girls have been running around together , from nursery school to dance recitals, soccer games, basketball games, lacrosse games, birthday parties, sleepovers, concerts and countless other events….Donna and I have been running too…literally and figuratively.

Together we have circled our neighborhood on foot too many times to count …and cycled through Napa, Tuscany, the San Juan Islands and the Hamptons. We have run alongside our darling daughters…if that is what you want to call “carpooling”... and we have, alone and with our other “Vuvs,” been very busy creating amazing memories of our own.

Tomorrow night, we will create another one. Devon is becoming a Bat Mitzvah and I am so excited I ‘m plotzing! Our lives have become so amazingly intertwined and so many people I love will be together in one room! AND, I don’t have to pay for it! It doesn’t get better. Well, it could be better if they would let me make a speech at the party….but it turns out, Gary, Donna’s husband and Dev’s dad, thinks that honor belongs to him….ugh! I suppose I understand...but as a result, I’ll say what I need to here.

Devon, I adore you. I have watched you, closely, as you have grown from age one and a half to 13...and I will share in your Bat Mitzvah with the same feelings I have every time I watch you run up the lacrosse field with Syd or watch your little tushy leave my car and scurry up your front steps….with feelings of love and pride. I know why you have been and are Syd’s BFF…and that is, to me, the greatest compliment I could give to either of you.

You are and will always be a source of joy to your family and friends.
Wishing you a life filled with love, happiness and success….and may I be able to keep up with your mother at the bar and on the dance floor tomorrow night and always.