• Thanksgivings. Check.
• Hanukkah. Check.
• Christmases still to come…

I’m thankful for my beautiful girls who I love more than I ever knew I was capable of.

I’m thankful for a family unique and different – full of steps and halfs and ex’es and inlaws and outlaws that just feels like plain old regular family… where everyone knows they are loved.

And I am so thankful to have found a mate who I laugh with until all hours of the night… so thankful that it positively makes me speechless.

Yep. Feeling a little gooey-smushey these days.

Love to you all, happy thanksgiving!

These are the notes my sweet Joy made this morning to pass out to her friends.

I adore that girl.

I have a full size bed. Which is slightly (and I do mean slightly) larger than a twin bed.

For the past couple of years, there have been many mornings when all three of us girls have woken up in my bed together – Joy and I on either edge, and Clara in the middle so she doesn’t fall off.

We’ve all been sick lately – tired, snotty, feverish, coughing. Last night – I should say more accurately, this morning – Clara started crying at 3 am and toddled into my our room. She crawled into bed between Kelley and me. A couple hours later, Joy had an accident (she swore me to secrecy because she loves Kelley so much and wants to be cool and doesn’t want him to know, so hopefully he will forget having read this sentence) and so she changed her pajamas and then crawled in between Clara and me. My rear was literally hanging off the edge of the bed.

So there I was this morning at 6 am. Smiling across the bed at Kelley, holding his hand across the tops of two little girl heads, and wondering how my heart can possibly have grown to be this huge without actually popping out of my body… and feeling like life can’t be any better than this.

I am more than just slightly ecstatic to report that I am marrying my absolute, perfect match. The man that I had been envisioning and hoping for all this time… he didn’t even come close to the actual, real-life human that I actually get to spend the rest of my life with.

Am I grossing you out or what? I’m just a little bit happy. You might be able to tell by this picture we took of ourselves, in the kitchen, on the day we got engaged. I have a ring. Of the real-life diamond variety. It’s on my finger, boys and girls. Being all diamond-like and glittery, yesseree bob.

My beloved cousin kindly reminded me this week that I have been seriously neglecting this blog and she has no good way to know what the hell is going on with my family these days. So I’m going to get my rear in gear, I promise. But I thought I’d start with my big news, so there you have it.

I’m getting married.

I am completely head over heels in love. The man does dishes. Completely of his own volition, while mumbling something like, “it’s teamwork babe.”

Here’s a picture of him saying, “are you really taking a picture of me doing dishes?”

Joy: You know that guy that was with my mom?

BFF: I know

Joy: Well, he’s my mom’s boyfriend

BFF: What?!?!? I thought they were just friends!

Joy: Hardly

It was pretty much as I suspected. A handful of the usual suspects.  Normal looking guys – probably perfectly nice, looking for dates. Nothing that interested me. And then I ran into this post. I couldn’t stop laughing out loud; I worried about waking the girls up with my snorting. Even though I’d never in my life emailed anyone on a dating site, I couldn’t resist emailing this guy just to tell him that he’d made my evening with this hilarious posting. And it turned out to be just the beginning…. (to be continued)

Re-posted with permission from MurderedByOwls

I was reading the personals the other day, and I ran across an ad entitled “Where are all the good men hiding?” I thought about writing to the woman and telling her about our secret clubhouse craftily hidden in a bunker underneath Old Navy, and that we meet there every night and talk about how lonely we are, and eventually someone says, “Hey! We should open the club to women!” This is always followed by great excitement and animated conversation with lots of sweeping hand gestures and hoots of glee, but then we remember that none of us know where the good women are, and after a long, desultory silence we all get in our cars and go home.

Day after day, our “I AM A GOOD MAN” tattoos discreetly concealed under our clothing, we practice our professions as writers, UPS drivers, organic pasta chefs, septic tank pumpers, and those guys who you always see in industrial training videos walking around clean rooms in white coats carrying clipboards. Occasionally, we raise our eyes from our work, fruitlessly scanning the area for signs of a good woman, but we all missed the day in high school Health class when they taught the guys how to recognize one, so we all wind up watching the girl in the tight slacks instead, wondering if she has “I AM A GOOD WOMAN” tattooed on her butt. There’s just no diplomatic way to ascertain this without surrendering our “good man” certification, though, so it invariably remains a mystery.

So I consider responding to this woman’s ad and telling her all this, and perhaps offering to send her a picture of my “I AM A GOOD MAN” tattoo, but then I realize that if word got out about the tattoos, pretty soon ALL the guys would get them, and there would be no way to tell us apart anymore. Then it would be like two guys, each with a Ph.D., one of them in Neurosurgery and the other in Comparative Philology. One of them is saving lives and making a million dollars a year, and the other guy is saying, “You want fries with that?” and swatting flies on the grill with a beat-up copy of “Beyond Good and Evil.” Also, part of the “G” in my tattoo has faded a little bit, so it looks like it says “I AM A COOD MAN.” I need to get that touched up.

In the end, she sounded so sweet and funny that I decided to write to her anyway, and just leave out the part about the clubhouse and the tattoos. It took me a while to write my reply because I really wanted to say something thoughtful and responsive. Also, I had to go help a friend tow his car home after he hit a moose on the freeway, and of course we couldn’t just let the moose lie there, so we strapped him to the top of my car and took him to the vet first. (I think my next car is going to be a pickup truck, because this convertible top is way too delicate for carrying huge palmate ruminants.)

In any case, I finally finished my intelligent (but not pompous), substantial (but not too long) and moderately witty (but not offensive) reply, but I still haven’t sent it. In all the time I’ve been in the “good man” club, nobody has ever written any of us back, and we’re all pretty discouraged. Except that one time that Svetlana girl wrote back to Phil, but when he called the number she gave him, he got some kind of Ukrainian sex chat line. She must have mistyped it or something.

Anyway, part of being a “good man” is overcoming the discouragement that is an occasional and unavoidable part of life, so I am going to send her the e-mail I wrote. I won’t expect a response, but I’ll be happy if I get one, even if it doesn’t turn into anything but a few exchanges of e-mail. It’s been a while since I got to know a woman well enough to trust her with the secret of my “I AM A GOOD MAN” tattoo, and I’m really looking forward to the moment when its strategic location is revealed to a new lover for the first time, and to hear the inevitable question: “Why do you have ‘IAMAN’ tattooed on your… wait… oh!”

It was a coffee date – the kind that a smart girl schedules so that if things go awry you can get out relatively quickly. We ordered our coffees and I was nervous enough that I think I might have actually been stuttering. We talked for a bit on the park benches while we drank our mochas… and I got the big ticket items immediately out of the way so I could watch for his reactions: 1) My loud laugh which can turn heads, 2) The fact that I have 2 kids by different dads… and he didn’t leave. In fact, both issues came and went without fanfare.

We walked some more and talked some more, ending up at a cafe where we sat and ordered drinks. And talked some more. And laughed. We went to the bookstore, which is basically my own version of heaven, and shared the experience. “Have you read this?” “I loved this book.” “Me, too – it was like this other book, which is a whole series.” “This is a book I’ve been meaning to read…” And we each made mental lists of the books we would lend each other.

We decided to stretch coffee into dinner, and continued talking and laughing for another hour. At the end of the afternoon, I walked him to his motorcycle. He hugged me and I swear I tried not to cling. I tried to do the quick hug – the kind you would do if you were cool and collected. But I must admit that I clung just a little bit to this man who made me feel so lighthearted and fun for a whole, unexpected Saturday afternoon.

Breath out.