Dinner Club hosted a baby shower today for the first of our own to go down this road.

It was a lovely affair -- no detail was overlooked. As our friend isn't crafty, there was a table set up to make her scrap book so all she has to do is slap in photos. The linens were perfectly white, everyone ate from real china with real silver. The dessert "tower" of strawberries, coconut cupcakes, and lemon bars was a spectacle. My contribution, a centerpiece of cookies made to look like her husband's "uniform" of a blue shirt and khaki pants (he wears it every day as he tries to keep the number of variables in his life to a minumum) shoved on lollipop sticks and poking out of a brown paper lunch sack, made both her mom and his mom laugh. She received darling things, as new moms do. It was a room of love, joy, and friendship, and K. looked adorable in her little 60s style dress, even as she desperately tried to sit with knees together.

I am so happy for K. -- she tried for this baby for over a year and is going to be an amazing mother, the kind who startles you by the ease with she takes to it. I have to admit, thought, that I have a hard time pushing down the little part of me that wants to compare where I thought I would be in my life, where I am, and where my friends are in their lives. I thought I would be where K. is by now, and I'm not.

I had this fleeting thought and looked around room and immediately felt like a jerk. One of the DC girls had in vitro twice and is on Chinese herbs and other non-traditional methods for fertility. One of my bosses wants a cat but her husband is deathly allergic -- she also wanted kids but couldn't get him to agree to it so she's looking at 50 with just the two of them (and no pets). One guest had just come from a memorial service for her neighbor, a woman in her late 30s with three young kids who died from an aggressive cancer over the span of just a few months.

I have to keep remembering that no one is exactly where they thought they would be, and if they say they are, they are probably lying or fooling themselves. Respect the little piece of you that keeps the vision, and enjoy whereever you are while you're there. And eat lemon bars.