Ok, y’all, since the first trimester ultrasound that showed, clearly, Oliver’s Y chromosome, I have known that I, as a woman, would always be in the minority in my family. Percy was a boy (RIP, buddy) and Nutmeg is a giant alpha-marking-everything male. I am repeatedly thankful for graceful Ruthie and her pink collar for giving me a sex-based compatriot in this household. She never makes inappropriate bathroom choices, she is gentle and yet quite the fierce huntress, and she does not mindlessly front-load her food. #Bless

I’ve actually found that I’m quite well-suited to boyish energy and humor, and I feel a profound responsibility for and honor in raising a different kind of man. One who is emotionally sophisticated, in touch with his inner self and endowed with an expansive vocabulary with which to process and express the spectrum of feeling and experience we all have, happy to hug and say “I love you,” and so forth.

I think I’m doing a solid job. The boys are marvelous humans. They are kind, generous, both say “I love you” all the time, have zero desire to “be cool,” are good to talk to, and express a decent variety of distinct emotions. My dearest husband is all of that in spades, minus, possibly, the last two. #Bless.

THAT SAID, jesus christ. Why? Why, what? you might ask. Why the immediate veer towards extreme bachelor living? And why must everything return to phalluses? Have y’all watched Mythic Quest? It’s a TV comedy about video game programming, and one of the key messages is TTP: time to penis. How long in any game, with any resources, will it take for a penis to emerge?

Two days ago, we had our first snow of the season, and it was a real one. A beautiful, multi-inch, yes-you-can-sled-and-need-to-shovel snow.

The kids bundled up, and raced out, and suddenly, interrupted from an “I can read now?” leap, there was a knock on the window and I looked up to this:

how pleased do they look? that is NOT a snowman.

TTP: immediate.

Today, both boys finally at school (no school for either on Monday; Oliver was virtual and Jack was home on Tuesday; today was a 2-hour delay), I walked around the house cleaning. What I saw boggles the mind, and some of this is all husband.

Observe: