Julia

BK is finally unpacking, now you may think that’s odd – haven’t I been talking about him being here for months? Why yes, yes I have. Apparently BK has spent the past three months waiting for the other shoe to drop and last week it kind of did…

I was in the living room when DH came running in and announced that Jack, the Golden Retriever was covered in blood. I followed him into the kitchen, just as Jack and BK were coming in the back door and BK’s eyes were wide. As a good Alpha, I rolled Jack onto his back and checked his chest to see if he had a cut – he didn’t. He was not covered in blood as much as he had a few streaks of blood in his cook, as though perhaps he had been slapped with a dead animal. What I didn’t realize is that while Jack was basking in the attention – BK was FREAKING out. He just knew, since he was outside with Jack that I was going to hold him responsible.

It took way too long to sort through everything and get down to the part where I realized that BK was flogging himself over this incident. At first I tried to brush it off with humor, asking if he had tied a sausage around Jack’s neck but I realized that wasn’t really getting me anywhere. Finally I pointed out that two of my big male dogs had gotten into an actual fight while I had them in the yard. He seemed unconvinced…

However, a couple of days later… he started to FINALLY unpack his bags. He admitted that he had kept things in a way that if he needed to leave in a hurry – he could. I was flabbergasted, but I’m just glad that he’s finally realized that he’s home.

It’s one of my favorite Jane Austen quotes:

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

It seems so completely and utterly true, that life just sometimes gets busy and when I sit down to write and I look back, I don’t know what I was so busy doing. There’s sushi with my boss every week, dinner with my boys every night, stalking house floor plans, day dreaming, working on getting BK back up and running, dreaming… I guess I haven’t accomplished very much but it’s been nice.

Maybe this quiet time is like a mental health day, I’ll take it and enjoy every sweet busy nothing along the way.

As my own family has officially become an unconventional one, I can’t help but contemplate what really makes a family, a family.

It’s a topic I’ve always found intriguing. I grew up with a somewhat unconventional family, most of my Aunts and Uncles that were there for every holiday, every special event, weren’t “real” family. They were my parents oldest friends, my blood relatives were people I saw once every couple of years. Aunt MR and CV were there, at least twice a year for all the big holidays, they were there for graduations, whenever it counted – that makes them real enough for me.

I also grew up with Uncle Bill and Uncle Bill, who weren’t a part of every holiday celebration but they were there for as long as I can remember. I don’t remember every being told that they were gay, they were just my Uncles, they loved each other and they loved us and love was all that mattered.

As an adult, my interest in this topic has lead me  to watch a myriad of television shows, reality and otherwise, that seem equally intrigued by the topic of what a family is. I started with Big Love on HBO and I eased into the reality TV waters on TLC with Sister Wives, The Duggars (who might not be terribly impressed to be considered unconventional, but 19 kids doesn’t sound very conventional…), etc. I watched these shows about families that were very different from mine, but couldn’t help but notice that they was no denying that they were families and in some ways not really that much different to mine.

I think about this more now that BK lives with us. We have a family calendar that we keep all of our events that impact the whole family – there’s one on there for tomorrow -BK and I are going to the Farmer’s Market and there’s on on there for Thursday – DH and I have a night out planned. Plans that affect our whole family unit, go on the calendar so when BK is planning the menu for the week, he knows Thursday is just him for dinner. If DH wakes up and wonders where we are on Saturday, a glance at the calendar reveals that we’re at the Market.

To avoid confusion, we say that BK is my brother and people have to be around us for less that about 10 minutes for that to seem like it must be true. (I may or may not have bitten him for bad behavior recently and he certainly gives me plenty of brotherly sass.) Of course in truth, BK is a friend who moved into our house and helped make us a family. It’s still something that kind of takes me by surprise, how people become a family – most people would say our family started when DH and I got married but I would say that was a tentative first step, but that true sense of family didn’t come until we really started spreading the love around or maybe I just need more coffee.

It’s been a rough day, full of icktastic conference calls, stubborn vendors and other nuisances… BK did not get the job he applied for and was excited about… I hurt myself while practicing archery – not seriously but enough to leave a visible bruise… And pretty much from the moment I got home BK and I have moved around each other like spiny sea urchins…

I love days like this. 

I love days like this because it’s easy to consider yourself a family on the good days. When you come home and the house is full of warm smells and you’re sitting there laughing over the days events. 

Days like today, when you find yourself struggling just to put up with each other, and you’re still there – that’s what it means to be family, at least in this house, and tomorrow, tomorrow may very well be better and less prickly. Today just being here, moving slowly and careful, is enough.

I’m starting to think that I should start a separate blog, called Life with Chef – BK has been living with us since mid-December. He is by trade a Chef, and his mere presence has been enough to chase me out of my kitchen for the most part, but what’s funny is that having BK around has changed the dynamic of my whole house.

In the hustle and bustle of every day life, our house had become like a hive that we buzzed in and out of, at all hours of the day… not so much the night. I am a morning bird, I wake up at 5am and I’m usually out the door before the sun is up. When I get home I used to buzz around the house doing chores, logging into work, and finding excuses to not do what I probably should be doing.

The effect of cooking is magical – the first day I walked in the door and BK had made dinner it was like opening the door to heaven, the whole house smelled warm and inviting. Bk’s magic is strong magic, it didn’t just turn my little hive into a home – it turned us all into a little family. You don’t eat the kind of meals that BK cooks, sitting in front of the TV. You eat them at the table with the TV off, and when you do suddenly there’s also conversation and laughter. It’s amazing.

I always thought to have a family you had to have children, I never dreamed moving a Chef in could turn three adults into a family.

I am pleased to say that my New Year’s Resolutions have been tested but so far, they’re unbroken. Almost right away I got a call saying that I *needed* to work on Saturday and I said no and stuck to my guns about it.

My friend BK and I took a day this weekend and went to Fairhope, Alabama and wandered around downtown. We ate at the Gumbo Shack, we bought buggy lemonade from two kids selling it at a table downtown, we went in and out of several shops chatting with owners and other patrons. BK taught a lady in an antique store what some of her antiques were used for in their past life. I was glad to spend some quite time ambling around with him.

After that we went home to cook, he made Chicken Tacos and I made Caramel Brownies – friends came over and brought Buffalo Chicken Dip and after we ate to our heart’s content, we all sat down to play cards.

It wasn’t a big celebratory weekend, not the kind that stands out in your mind as being out of the ordinary, but I hope that I can write this quite weekend full of friends and love on my heart and hold it close for always.

2013 in my house came not with a bang but a chuckle. As a former bartender I’ve never really been much a fan of New Year’s Eve but this year was exceptionally laid back, even by my usual standards. We ate well, very well, and curled up in front of the TV with Spider Man and Walking Dead and while visions of super heroes and zombies danced on my screen, I couldn’t help but let me thoughts turn inward.

2012 was a difficult year for me, one of the most difficult of my adult life. It was the first time that hard work and preparation didn’t mean a successful outcome in my endeavors. For the first time I experienced what I consider to be true catastrophic failure. Then I stretched myself too thin and let important things fall to the wayside over things that seemed important at the time. I have to say looking back on 2012, it still stings a little.

However, I learned that I am stronger that I thought I was – things at work went wrong, terribly wrong, and even when confronted with my worst nightmare, I survived. Did I pull it off with as much dignity and grace as I could have? Well no, but I survived and some days that in and of itself seemed a spectacular feat.

My goals for 2013 are fairly simple:

Say “no” more: I have a tendency to over-book and over-commit myself and then I miss out on the things I really want to do, things that involve the people I care about. I hope in 2013 that there’s less of that.

Working Smarter, not Harder: I don’t mind long hours when I’m getting things done, but long hours doing tedious tasks are for the birds. There’s alot to accomplish but there should be a better ways to do it other than to keep trying to cram more work hours into a day.

Focus on what’s actually important rather than what feels important: When work is screaming that the sky is falling or people are demanding time. It’s hard to not feel like I should be giving the squeaky wheel the oil, but the people who are graciously taking the back seat are the ones who probably deserve my time and attention, I’m going to focus on them.

Here’s hoping that 2013 is a place of more peace, of more counting blessings, than 2012 was – I’m hoping that’s true for you too.

Okay, you can’t really go wrong with Team Unicorn… and Zombies…

When I was a girl every year for Christmas, my Dad and I made cookies. The cookie recipe is just the Better Homes and Garden Sugar Cookie recipe – nothing too our of the ordinary, the specialness of the cookies was in the icing. It’s a minty kind of glaze that my Dad concocted, based on his memories of his mother’s Christmas cookies. The cookies were generally thickly slathered with this icing, studded with redhots, and then consumed with wreckless abandon. Until I hit my late teens and I admitted to my Dad that I didn’t really care for the secret family icing recipe, proposed we could try some new recipes, and then I was unceremoniously cut out of the cookie tradition.

In my defense, I was a teenager and didn’t really understand that my Dad was a human being, he was just my Dad. I didn’t understand that I had made him feel that I wasn’t just rejecting his icing recipe – I was rejecting him. A precious tradition was almost lost all together.

Until a couple of years ago, when my Dad was at my house at Christmas time. I had made cookies for a neighborhood project where I was talking cookies to the fire department and the police station and I proposed that while all this cooking was going on that we make the *famous* family cookies again, and we did.

Our tradition has been revived for the last three years, and this year after my Dad left and the house was full of wonderful Christmas smells I looked at the plate of beautiful colorful cookies. I wished that there was a way to preserve them, not to eat later but to look at and remember one of my favorite holiday traditions, a link to my Dad and to a Grandmother that I don’t really remember very well.