Girlfriend

Laura has a friend over to spend the night. It is 11 pm, and they are going strong, having announced their intention to "stay up until midnight, then lie in bed and read from midnight to 6:00." I told them I was perfectly fine with this plan. Laura's friend, F, is a new girl in the neighborhood. They swam together on the swim team, and F will be starting second grade at L's school.

So L and I have matching mother-daughter crushes. Laura has a crush on F (they are totally in the friend infatuation stage), and mine is on F's mom, because she likes to drink a beer in the afternoon and she is pretty like a doll. And she's smart, y'all, and normal, and nice. I'm smitten and I just hope she feels the same!

When I meet someone new in the neighborhood, and find that I talk with them easily, that we share a basic common language of living in the social world, and that words, facial expressions, and gestures still mean what I always thought they meant, it reaffirms to me that Frenemy Neighbor is perhaps a visitor to our planet, struggling to live among us, and while she needs our help and tolerance, I am not the weird one here. Phew! (Lately, though, I see signs of FN's humanity and vulnerability that are troubling to me. Rest assured, there will be more about that later.)

Anyway, Laura and I are both enjoying getting to know our new ladyfriends. On the Suburban Matron scale of playdates, F would rank as a solid 1 on her own merits, AND would score in category 2 because I like her mom. Pretty Neighbor and I just clicked right away. When she drops her kid off, she doesn't do that SUV-idling-in-the-driveway-waving-out-the-window thing. She turns off the car, comes inside, and honest-to-god sits down when I invite her to. No hovering, no perching, no refusing a chair then sitting on the ottoman. And then we have a conversation. Sometimes we have a beverage. Awesome.

And Laura and F are funny together. Right now they are sharing a blanket and watching Barbie: The Island Princess (it's the least creepy of those Barbie movies--that's my endorsement). It's the scene where the pretty but obscure girl is lamenting the fact that she has nothing to wear to her big night at the castle. The girls are rapt. F just sighed and said, "I bet she's going to look great at that ball."