Little Ditty about Jack and Ryan………

(sung in my best John Mellencamp impression voice)

During our trip, a beautiful friendship was born. One that was the talk of the pool, and actually the entire lounge chair area! One that I believe will be lifelong, even if only for one week out of every year.

It all began with 2 little boys from 2 different places: each wearing a different hat and each sporting a different number of chromosomes.

Everyday Ryan would wear his NY Yankees hat, and another little boy in the pool always wore a Boston Red Sox hat. They started playing catch with each other and really seemed to click. Everyone was joking about it, because of the infamous Yankees/Red Sox rivalry, but these boys didn’t seem to care about what anyone else thought, they just continued to play together and make each other laugh.
As the days went on, they would get more and more goofy. Catch lead to playing Tug of War, which lead to splashing each other in the pool. They really became inseparable ~ until I had to separate them when they started “wizard fighting” – whatever that is! Boys will be boys, I suppose.
One night, while we were out on the beach, we heard shouting. We turned around to see Jack and his Dad on their balcony, waving like crazy, and calling Ryan’s name. Within moments, they both joined us on the beach. Jack’s dad, Rich, said that Jack told his parents he just HAD to come down to the beach when he saw us out there, because “Ryan was his best friend in the whole world EVER!” For the rest of the trip, we all pretty much hung out together. If Jack and his family were spending the day at the beach, so were we. His parents were really nice, and very cool. We all had fun together.

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The morning we were leaving, they showed up at our door. Jack wanted to have one last catch and say goodbye to Ryan (even though we had exchanged email addresses the night before) Jack also wanted to give Ryan the new ball that Jacks mom had bought for them to play with in the pool. In return, Ryan gave Jack one of his matchbox cars. It was so sweet. These boys really became great friends and were sad to say goodbye to one another.
Jack and his family live in Boston and we are thinking about heading there in July for a DS conference. If we do, we will surely call them to meet up again.

The moral of this story is that all of the worrying I used to do about whether or not Ryan would make/have “typical” friends was again tossed aside as I watched these 2 boys play together. As always, my son has proven to me that I wasted so much time in the beginning worrying about the what ifs? None of the differences I mentioned at the start of this post mattered to these boys ESPECIALLY the chromosome count. Neither one of them cared about their differences, all that mattered to them was that they hit it off and became instant BFF’s!