Some friends you grow into and some are passed down to you be your predecessors.

Sammy, Anna, and Michal are these sort of friends.

Sammy is the very likeness of his father, Tim, one of Nate’s favorite childhood buddies. Most of Nate’s school day memories involve Tim, his sidekick brother Titus, and a trusty camcorder. Together they created short films of a caliber yet to be discovered on YouTube.

Twenty-five years before “Wheelbarrow Pusher” and “Neo-Chicken,” made it to the Twenty-Inch Samsung, my dad was taking piano lessons from Tim’s grandma in a little farming community in South Dakota. And when Anna’s grandma went off to college, she took Ava’s great aunt along to be her roommate.

In fact, Anna was supposed to be Ava’s very first roommate. Yes, Ava and Anna were scheduled to be delivered at the same hospital, but Ava’s fickle mama jumped ship at the last minute. I thought that going to an all mid-wife unit would be the perfect place to have an all-natural emergency cesarean. Thus the friends came into the world two days and two miles apart.

So while a windy autumn day filled with wagon races, tree climbing lessons, play house snacks, and sand box treasure hunts adds to the growing bond of friendship, Ava really has no choice to be Anna’s friend–it’s in her DNA.