I hate you, In Laws

Dear Father in Law,
Thank you for inviting yourself and your high-maintenance wife to stay with us, and for deciding that it would be a great treat if you made us dinner. I am not entirely sure why you wanted to make avocado soup with avocados that you brought from Massachusetts, because are they IN SEASON there or something? Or is it because they TRAVEL WELL? And I am not sure why the resulting soup had a disgustingly suety flavor, but it was one of the most unpleasant things I've eaten in a long-ass time, and eating it without visibly gagging required me to pretend I was participating in some kind of horrible game show.

I digress. What I really wanted to say is this: your cooking a revolting meal for us falls short of being helpful when you destroy my kitchen in the process, creating a mess of epic proportions. And alas, your offer to clean up is worth very little, as 1) it comes only after I have completed most of the work and 2) I know you will wash things without soap or hot water because you are some kind of backwards hippie, and everything in the entire universe will be coated with a scum of avocado.
Yours in Suppressed Rage,
Bunny

P.S. I hate you.

Actually, my in-laws are perfectly nice people. There's a mother in law, who is pushy and pisses me off, but is not actually a monster (unlike Jen's), a sister in law who is also pushy and always comes with a plan that does not necessarily match MY plan, and a dog that likes to nip at me any time I move, which I find a bit unacceptable but my sister in law apparently finds just dandy, and a father in law plus stepmother in law, who are new-agey and have a lot of health requirements, but are also kind, loving people. So it is a bit of a surprise to find myself HATING all of them. I'd have thought having some shared genetic material would bring us closer, but instead, I find myself bristling at the mere mention of their names. There's all this extra hostility, and I'm not sure where it comes from. Maybe it's the fact that I've seen a lot of them and not a lot of my family, and they've all oohed and aaahed over how much Bun Bun looks like her father and I feel left out. Or maybe it's some territorial thing where I want to exclude all outsiders that are not related to me by blood?

Anyway, I can always comfort myself with the fact that Bun Bun has MY last name and not Mr. Bunny's. SO THERE.

Also:
We took our baby OUT IN PUBLIC. Several times since I wrote that post about taking our baby out in public, in fact. Our local botanical garden has a cocktail hour on Wednesday evenings, and the promise of liquor amongst the topiaries was sufficient to lure us out of the house. With our baby. It was a good test case--alcohol* was present, but it was outdoors so we could always hide in a shrubbery if necessary. As it happens, it was not necessary--we drank our drinks and walked about like regular people. With a baby. I got two totally disfiguring mosquito bites on the FACE, and we went home.

Before leaving, we paused at the bench where I sat in August and wondered if we'd ever have a child. Little did I know, Bun Bun had already been created. Despite my total lack of faith in the possibility, her little cells were dividing away. It can happen, people. It really can.

But I didn't intend to get all nostalgic and shit, it just turned out to be a particularly poignant first recreational trip out.

So then, emboldened by our success, we went to BRUNCH, and then we went OUT TO DINNER. We sat outside and we went quite early, but still. Our favorite server came over and told us all about her trip to Europe, and I got drunk on a mojito.* It was pleasant.




*I missed a lot of opportunities to have a cocktail during all those might-be-but-of-course-was-not-pregnant-cycles...