Happy Holidays (Blink Blink)!

So, happy new year! We're three days into 2019--have you gotten used to writing that date on your checks yet?

Hahahaha! I jest, of course. The first few days of a new reality are not the days in which we absent-mindedly fill in a form with a previous name. (I had been Mrs. Husband for several years when I realized I had just signed a check with my maiden name. I blame that slip on the toddlers who were biting at my ankles. My subconscious obviously was fondly remembering the placid days of spinsterhood.) Also, who writes checks these days? Besides me, I mean? No one.

Anyway, it was a lovely, lovely holiday at the House on the Corner. We missed the #2's, of course. We had spent intense days together in October at the wedding so the newlyweds decided to use their accumulated vacation days on a honeymoon in Portugal rather than on a hectic, cold, travel-fraught weekend in Small Town Kansas. I know! Can you believe that choice?

During last weekend, though,  the remaining Boys and Lovely Girl#1 were here to celebrate Christmas/New Years/Three's Birthday and it was another reminder that being the mother of grown-ups is worth every single bout of norovirus I endured during their childhoods. (They may have hosted that virus in their digestive systems, but the smell has never left my nostrils.)

In fact, that appreciation for grown-up offspring was underscored and outlined in sparklers when I woke up during the holiday week with my left eye feeling itchy.

You know where this is going, right? Yup. A quick photographic text consult with our in-family opthalmologist (feel free to bill me, Lovely Girl #2) confirmed that I have apparently returned to my toddler roots.

 I had pinkeye.

Here are the bad things about having pinkeye as an adult: It looks really terrible, and people who see you recoil in horror. It feels as if you've been standing outside in a sandstorm. It is highly contagious.

Here are the good things about having pinkeye as an adult, especially as an adult who has been slightly buffeted by the holiday season: Except for that icky eye, you feel perfectly fine, but have societal permission--nay ENCOURAGEMENT--to hibernate and knit, read, do All The Things that are healing and energy-restoring.

Dr. Lovely Girl emphasized that I should wash-wash-wash my hands, then wash them again, and  head to urgent care if the redness worsened. Other than that, though, there weren't any restrictions.

With a house full of family, though, my first concern was whether mah bay-bees would starve to death if I wasn't there to poke food into their mouths every time they opened their beaks. Dr. LG gave a qualified okay to cooking--"If you wash your hands really thoroughly first and clean all the countertops before you start you should be okay," she texted.

The guys were having none of that, though. Five minutes later they'd planned meals for the rest of the week and I had handed over a debit card for shopping.

See the picture above? On the left is Boy#3. He hooked his own extruder to my KitchenAid mixer and made homemade pasta. On the right is Boy#4, shown mincing garlic for Chana Masala, a spicy Indian chickpea dish he served with naan. Other meals included chili (secret ingredient: brown sugar to counter the extra jalapeno) and spaghetti carbonara, and I lifted not one finger to help.

I'm taking away two lessons from this:

Lesson Number One is that I did not permanently scar the Boys by neglecting to teach them to cook. Seriously, I was a terrible, terrible mother in this respect. Cooking with kids made me edgy and irritable, and they left home knowing how to make chocolate chip cookies and not much else. All four have become excellent and adventuresome cooks, and two have married excellent and adventuresome cooks. It is another reminder that parenthood boils down to keeping them vaccinated and teaching them to look both ways when they cross streets, and they pick up almost everything else on their own.

Lesson Number Two is that I spend way too much mental bandwidth worrying about food when my family is home. When I'm the cook in charge I eat one meal already thinking about the next meal and what ingredients I need for that next meal and what time I need to start cooking that meal. No one was nearly as concerned about our eating this vacation, I was much more present in each moment--and the food was better.

So, summing up: My family is the best, and having grown-up offspring is still the best stage of life.

Also, I'm voting for pinkeye as the best virus to host. It has norovirus beat by a landslide.