A bit late on the post here but oh well: Carrie, her husband Jason and their daughter Amie drove up to Toronto from Chicago last weekend for a visit. It was a fun time — Saturday exploring Kensington Market and more of Toronto, and Sunday at the Toronto Zoo, and then in the evenings the five of us would come back to our apartment, we’d put Amie down in the bedroom, and the four of us would have some adult conversational time together.

Unfortunately we didn’t get a picture of the five of us because we’re kind of dumb, but here’s a couple that show everyone from Carrie’s Flickr set of the trip (because I didn’t bring our camera along!):

(Lushes.) The top picture is from Future Bakery, and the bottom from the Victory Cafe. It was a pleasant surprise to me how easy it was to find places to flop on a patio that were kid-friendly, and with the heat and all the walking we did a lot of flopping.

It was a fun weekend on the face of it, but it was also great because this is the first time the five of us have all been together. Candice and I met Carrie for the first time at Trevor and Jenny’s wedding back last September. What happened next is complicated, but Carrie and I learned we had had an old mutual crush on each other, helped each other through some hard times in the month or so after that wedding (Carrie was a big help in my decision to withdraw from the MBA, for instance), ended up pretty close, and we had been struggling since to try to find the best way to remain a part of each other’s lives in a way that made our families feel safe and respected (and through a lot of change on Candice’s and my part, with me leaving school and us moving to Toronto!).

That hasn’t been easy, but this weekend things clicked. Misunderstandings cleared up; Jason and I finally met and got along well (and we learned we share an awful sense of humour, to the point where we were often racing to make the same bad pun first); Amie took to me so well that Candice and Carrie were calling me her boyfriend; and the whole thing was just comfortable. It felt like family, which was sort of a goal that Carrie and I had talked about months ago but which I sometimes thought was impossible.

What better way to finish off than this:

(And for those keeping track, now you know #23.)