There is nothing like family to make you really appreciate your friends.
Wait. Maybe that didn’t come out quite the way I meant it. Or maybe it did. Because no matter how harmonious your household, no matter how enchanting you find your own little clan, throwing a few carefully chosen friends into the mix can ratchet everybody’s happiness up a few notches.
The Fortunes recently spent a long weekend at the beach with one of our favorite families – our friends the Fridays. Each family has one mom who runs a lot and works a lot, one dad who works odd hours, loves golf and spends lots of time with the kids, and two sons. The four boys are 6, 7, 10 and 11.
In just about every way, this equation could not come out better.
Because I have to name everything, I think of this group of eight as the Friday Fortune Alliance. In addition to all the other groovy things about friendship with a family with whom we have this much in common, I’m pretty sure those are the two coolest last names in the world (and I get to say that because I married into mine).