Every morning Scuba makes me a cappuccino and brings it to me while I’m still in bed trying to wake up.  He wins at mornings, that’s for sure  Usually I am awake a lot of the night and fall into a good, deep sleep just about an hour before I need to wake up. Yes, I take melatonin.  No, I don’t ingest any caffeine after 10 a.m.  There’s just something about 3 a.m. that wakes me up a lot and something about 6 a.m. that makes me so, so sleepy. 

I’ve got the house all to myself tonight for the first time since we moved in, I think.  I spent my precious alone time doing dishes and laundry, picking up the girls’ room, figuring out where in the hell the crawl space trap door is before the electrician comes tomorrow (floor of Lex’s closet!), and watching the videos my cousin gave me on Sunday of our family’s 1988 reunion.  There’s my dad, telling a story.  I’m next to him, just a tiny bit older than Lex is now, in my baggy clothes, ducking my head when I know the camera is nearby.  Hearing my dad’s laugh again is devastating and wonderful in pretty similar amounts, so I’m laughing and crying and maybe kissing my finger and touching it to the screen once or twice.  God, my stepmom was pretty.   

Scuba says, in the nicest way, that it’s a little depressing around here.  Here being the blog and not our house or anything.  Our house is mostly happy – as happy as it can be given the number of teenagers and all that.  Well, I tell him, I’m just so sad still.  And he says, Of course you are, how could you not be? 

Mostly, though, I am not sad.  I mean, I *am* sad about my dad, but everything else has finally arrived after a lifetime of wishing.  My dad used to make this kind of clicking sound and shake his head when he was talking about, well – missed opportunities and things that we’d say were too bad, I guess.  And that’s what I have, this sad click all the time that he’s not able to come see our new house and help with the physics homework and watch the girls play soccer and debate politics with Lex and his girlfriend and then tell me afterward how impressed by them he is.  He still had so much of a life to live, you know?  But I’ve got this incredible kitchen to cook in, this amazing garden to try and care for, all this light coming in the windows.  I’m happy and I’m crushed and I don’t think that one really excludes the other.