If You Cut Me, Do I Not Bleed Chee-tos?

Me: *ugh.* You are such a music snob.

A: I think you mean "expert."

*******

I put a video of Bird in my sidebar. Two and a half is the best age ever. She's like a little foreign game show host, so excited and innocently trying to learn this language. You joking me around!

The in-laws were in town over the weekend. My pantry now closely resembles aisle 4 at Kroger, with every conceivable packaged, cheese-flavored, artificially colored dry snack shoved into six square inches of counter space. I must publicly pat myself on the back for harvesting all of the cold canned diet cokes from the fridge and putting them back in their cardboard case to send back to Indiana when the in-laws departed this morning, saving me the temptation to drink one with every meal until they're gone and feel like over-caffeinated, chemical shit for a solid week. Yay, me!

Bird invited the grandparents to the library's kick-ass puppet theater, giving A. and I a chance to poke around the CDs and fiction for 45 childless minutes. (currently reading this). We went out to eat at a new neighborhood restaurant, A. and his dad played golf, I made a fabulous vegetable strata for breakfast and made everyone eat lentils for dinner Friday night, and everyone was happy to be in each other's company for a few days regardless of our limited space.

I even got to get away for a few hours late Saturday night to play Spinner with three of my favorite wine-soaked, trash-talkin' ladies. They play for blood. And chocolate.

All in all, a good weekend, even if there was some stirring-up of religious compost Sunday morning that released some stinky emotional gas. I'll be private about the details but I will say that I am so very proud of my husband for the choices he's made, the respect he's shown me when it comes to my own beliefs, the compromises he's made for our family and his willingness to defend those decisions, and the commitment he's made to finding what's right for our little group of three, regardless of what the Pope or any other interested party thinks about it. A, you are a helluva guy.

We had a delightful Sunday dinner tonight with the regular cast of characters, I ate pie AND brownies, I snuggled a smooshy baby, and Bird dropped her dress-up shoe in the toilet without escalating to crisis. Sweet progress.

I also got a job offer late Friday afternoon, the details of which I plan to negotiate but am 99% certain I will take. It's a job -- get this-- writing. And it's full time, which changes some things but not others, and which weighs on my mama-heart and at the same time really doesn't, and all kinds of other complicated, layered chatter. Which I may post here sometime. The bottom line is that it's more money, more stability and nobody dies (at least not as a routine part of the job-- a welcome change), and, um, I have a ten-year-old degree in creative writing degree sitting around somewhere that I've been itching to dust off. So there you have it. Thanks for your good thoughts, I got the slob. And now I must find a way to gracefully extract myself from a four-seat nonprofit staff that is already one man down and struggling. *gulp*