can of kornelsen: BC continued...

More about my most recent trip to the Heart of the Fraser Valley!

The Sisters
You can take the girl out of the triplet but you can't take the triplet out of the girl.

My sisters and I have lived pretty much separate lives for probably close to 8 years now, generally since we graduated high school (but I'd say even the couple of years before then, we were already doing our own things). We lived together for a year in between then and now, but still, our lives were all going in very much opposite directions. And even now, we have all made different choices for careers and general lifestyles, we can have very different opinions on certain things, and our personalities are definitely unique to each of us, but still - once upon a time we were limb to limb, folded together like a perfect puzzle for months on end, three little beings that started off as one. Crazy!
And we joke about the fact that because of her proximity to the access to food in the womb, Devan was the little chub of the litter, weighing in at 5lbs14oz, while I was a runty 5lbs1oz - or that poor Nadsy was squished by her hefty sister and had to spend a couple of weeks in an incubator - but the reality is, it is mind-boggling even to us that we get to be triplets.

People have asked in the past if we feel each others physical pain - like if Nadia's snake bit her, would I yelp out in pain 4000km away? The answer is, for the most part, no. But strange things have happened. For example, while I was living in Red Deer, Devan got a patch of very painful shingles on her lower back. Needless to say I felt awful for her, especially because I hadn't seen her in months and couldn't help her out in any way. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when shortly afterward, I got a teeny shingles patch of my own at the exact same spot as my sister. I called them sympathy shingles. Other things have happened too. We have all woken up in the morning from having almost exactly the same random, out of the ordinary, dreams as eachother. We also have an eyewitness that we have conversations with eachother in our sleep.

To this day, even as different as we have become, there are certain things that just don't go away. We have a nearly identical sense of humour with many things, and can laugh together without even really having to say too much. We still manage to end up unknowingly buying the same shoes as one another, provinces away, and found on some lonely clearance rack at the back of a store. When we are together, we are constantly saying the same things at the same time (which I've been told can be a little eerie, especially if we're strategically placed in a Druid-esque semi circle around someone). More than that, it is always a little odd to know that there are two other people in the world who you can honestly say knows exactly what you're thinking.

You can see why it is difficult to be away from that kind of deep connection.
We were very fortunate this past BC visit to actually be able to spend some one-on-one (??) time with one another - it is something we have been attempting for the past couple of visits, but with all of our conflicting schedules, has never happened. So on the Monday evening, I was able to drop Hudson off with my mom, and Nadia and I zipped out to meet Devan in Vancouver, after she got off from work. And in typical triplet-style, Devan and I showed up in the exact same shirt as one another. As we just so happened to be standing right outside one of the stores we bought them from, naturally Nadia went and purchased the matching shirt. Oh, and did I mention that a pleasant young man stopped Nadia and I on the way to meeting Devan and asked if we wanted to go for coffee with him (declined!), and then a few minutes later while we were still searching for our dear sister, the same young man picked her out of all the eligible ladies in downtown Vancouver, and asked if she wanted to go for coffee with him (declined again!)?

Anyways - we had a great time together that evening. We strolled through the streets of downtown, went to a pub in gastown, got a touristy snapshot by the steam clock, stopped for a coffee on the way back to our vehicles, and just had some awesome sister-time. It was more than just catching up on the basics. We actually got to talk about a few things that we don't normally get to conference about, and once again, discovered how similar at the base of it all we really are.