vandopoly: dido

I quickly perused my blog posts and I don’t think that I’ve ever done a post on DIDO. Shocking.

We recently talked about this and we think DIDO started in 2005. At that time, the lives of our group of friends were shifting from our close-knit, Vancouver-centric lives to marriage and buying houses that forced us out of our centralized city locales. The bottom line was: we seemed to be seeing less of each other. One of my girlfriends came up with the idea of DIDO from one of her girlfriends, who was doing the same thing with a group of friends. The concept is simple: once every other month, we would take turns organizing a get together. We could either go to one of our houses and order in food or go out to eat - Dine In or Dine Out.

“We” is our group of 8 friends - 4 couples. When we started this, we mostly dined out. It was a great way to go to different restaurants and catch up with old friends at the same time. Bri and I introduced the first newcomer to DIDO probably at the beginning of 2007 - Josh. This added a new dimension to DIDO. We didn’t want things to change “too” much for just this one baby, so we tried to continue going out to restaurants. But, of course, the focus was much different for Bri and I. Also, everyone was keenly aware that mealtimes are much more…distracted with babies so we tried to go to more family friendly places. Even though we didn’t mean to, we slowly started to change the tone of DIDO.

Towards the end of 2007, M and J introduced their first newcomer to DIDO. Our group of 8 was now a group of 10 and growing!

Today, 7 years after starting DIDO, when we are lucky enough to get all 4 families out, we have to reserve a table for 14 - 8 adults and 6 kids. And we rarely get together JUST to go to a restaurant. These days, it’s all about the kids. We’ve done Canada Day celebrations, picnics at the beach or water park, Kris Kringle’s and countless dine in’s, because they are SO much easier than dining out!

MJME organized our October DIDO and managed to get 3 our of our 4 families out to the pumpkin patch last Sunday morning (LPD, we missed you guys!). It was pouring rain on the drive out to Langley and we almost turned around and headed for dim sum. But dumb luck (and lack of being able to get in touch with everyone to change plans!) brought us out to Aldor Acres. We thought it might be a short, wet experience, but then, part way through the morning, the clouds parted and we saw sun and blue skies. It turned out to be a perfect morning for the pumpkin patch (with some great photos below)!

The kids had a blast (mostly) and by the time we left Aldor Acres just after lunch, we were happy and thoroughly chilled. We decided to drop into Tim Horton’s for hot chocolate before the drive home, but we ended up in McDonald’s. It only took 7 years for us to end up doing DIDO at McDonald’s! Ha. The best part was that we actually managed to have an adult table and kids table for probably a good 20 minutes (possibly the beginning of a new DIDO tradition?!). It may not seem long, but with kids, that’s just enough time for us to have some good conversation and finish our hot drinks. Perfect.

It will be interesting to see how our DIDO’s evolve as the kids get older. I’m so happy that we’ve managed to continue our DIDO tradition for 7 years. To LES, MJME and LPD: we are so lucky to have friends like you! Thanks and PS: I think it’s our turn to organize for December DIDO!