This Is the Post You've Been Waiting For

Six weeks! For six weeks you've been waiting for this post, through the yards and yards of blue paint tape and the multiple pictures of my peonies and most of this gorgeous spring. I had hinted that the painting of the back entry was largely spurred by a Special Guest who was expected at the House on the Corner during the first weekend of April. Now, finally, you are getting your first glimpse of the source of all that scurrying.

If you had guessed that we were hosting the Pope, you were wrong. It was this Special Guest!

Husband and I had met her before, when we were visiting Boy#2 where they are both going to school (hint: see her t-shirt), and we had fallen in love with her. She is off-the-charts smart, which is so much fun to be around. She's funny, which is also fun to be around. She's beautiful, which is a nice bonus. She can make sushi, which matters not at all to me but is interesting. So we had gotten along swimmingly in their end of the country.

But there is always a tiny niggle of concern that things will go south when someone new is introduced into the chaos that is our household. All of the Boys and Lovely Girl were coming home to meet this Special Guest, and even I (who love them with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns) will admit that this is the equivalent of a box of (very, very large) puppies and while a box of puppies is adorable it can lose its charm quickly and deteriorate into a big ol' pile of yipping un-housebroken stinkiness. (Wow. Sorry, Beth. That sentence escaped its leash.)

This could happen, people.

Anyway, I shouldn't have worried. Halfway through the second day I realized I couldn't tell from the kitchen whether it was Lovely Girl or Special Guest who was shouting smack at her opponent in the game of Pandemic, She fit in as if we had saved her a place and marked it with her name.

Which brings up a difficult point, one that Two also had been thinking about when I asked him whether this girl would mind if I blogged about her.

"What are you going to call her on the blog?" he texted me.

"Well, for now I'm calling her Special Guest because I don't want to be jumping the gun on anything," I wrote him back. This is, verbatim and copied, the next exchange of texts:

Two: Ah, that's too bad. I was really hoping you'd take requests. 

Me: Go for it.

Two: She haaaaaaaaaaaaaates the name Pookie. So I was wondering if you could do me a solid here.

Me: No. Just, no. Because I like her a lot. 

Two: Do you not love me more?

Me: Well, at this point I have more loyalty to you.

Two: I may have led her to believe that I had the power to select her Blog Name. 

Me: Uh-oh. Well, huh.

Two: And so unless you want to embarrass me in front of my friends...or...friend...

You see? You see what a special person it will take to put up with this kind of balderdash? Now you understand why I was nervous about her visit.

She was a Special, Special Guest and I hope she returns soon and often, until she's not a guest at all.