Lily’s boyfriend came to dinner for the first time tonight. I pushed through the Friday fatigue and made pizzas and a big salad to try to feed the now full house with Margaret home as well for spring break. We often just eat in the living room these days – after years and years of enforcing the sit down dinner, I’ve gone more casual – we eat together almost always, just much less formally, come as you are, eat what you want. Well, Lil really wanted to show how normal we can be I guess, so we I set out a big spread, dinner was served at seven at the table and it really was nice.

And I suppose it was normal. If normal table conversation starts with Margaret announcing she was going to share some fun facts and entertaining stories of Mexican drug cartels (to be fair, it WAS entertaining). And then we moved into Alice sharing her recent reading on poisonous plants and all the unsuspecting victims who end up in emergency rooms after eating what they believe are wild lettuce or rogue carrots. Then Lily shared that due to graffiti run amok, her school closed on the bottom floor bathrooms. Which led John to comment that now half the school population wears diapers, and then Margaret and Alice to go off on the idea of chamber pots in classrooms. There was a spirited argument over whether wine does or does not taste like rotting corpses and I think by the time we were eating the cookies the boyfriend brought, we were on a debate of whether satanism is a religion.

My people. In the midst of the all of it, sometimes I just look around with wonder and disbelief and think “I made this.” They are so strange and wonderful. Even exhausted on a Friday night after such a long week, I love all of this. My favorite wingnuts.

I really hope we didn’t scare the boyfriend off. The cookies he brought were outstanding.