And now back to our regularly scheduled programming..

The thing about grief is, most people don't have time to wallow in it. There's swimming lessons to attend, the garbage still needs to be taken out, and the kids are always after you for things like food and clean clothes, or they can't find their Princess Kitty. So you push it to the back of your mind where you can still feel it lurking, and it bubbles up unexpectedly. Like, when your daughter (who has been afraid of the water for most of her four and a half years) suddenly jumps into the deep end of the pool in a surge of bravery and you burst into tears. But, Yay Gracie!

Jack's been struggling, too. The girls will be starting kindergarten this year (see! watery eyes as I type that sentence), and I've been talking about getting some kind of part-time job. I caught Jack throwing out the classified section of the paper and he went off on how we don't need fancy vacations or video games (really? I wished I'd recorded that), but "we need to come home to a mom, not a babysitter." And then, just as I thought my heart would explode, he added, "Besides, you never even finished college. What kind of job could you get?"