Change in all the areas of my life...

And the test results came back and were negative. So I can quit worrying about THAT, plus or minus some concern as to whether it was a tick borne thing from our hike a few weeks ago. But it's unlikely, so I'm trying not to worry about that either.

It's funny - a lot of people wouldn't believe l worry as much as I do, as I somewhat perpetually am known amongst my friends for having "surgically-attached rose colored glasses". The thing is... that's really a question of not having an "in between" setting - either I have to completely convince myself that bad things are impossible OR I go pretty high anxiety. So I have a certain tendency to pull a Scarlett O'Hara and decide to "think about that tomorrow". ::shrug:: it's not entirely a bad thing, though it does make me a bit of a grasshopper when it comes to planning for the future.
 
Great news! I hope he is feeling better and you both stay well. Whew!
 
Welp. That was awkward. Last night _started_ lovely - made very tasty fancy food (sous vide tuna steaks with sauce Béarnaise) for the four of us (me, Artist, Knight and Joan), and then eventually retired to the bedroom for what was probably one of the better kink scenes we’ve had. I mean I know I say that every time but I swear he gets better it every time sooooo... yeah. I mean I had enough endorphins going that I literally couldn’t feel my face for parts of it (apparently that might be some level of hyperventilation but whatever) and ... well anyway. It was amazing. But apparently despite fairly loud music playing, was also kind of ... audible outside the room. Not ideal...

In fact, when I picked up my phone to change said music, there was a text from Knight: “Ok, so in the morning, you get to explain to {MiniMe} that you were totally ok.” 😳 Apparently kiddo had wandered downstairs to get water, instead of being asleep like I thought he was, and heard one of the more intense bits over the music we had on. Folded over dragontails are thuddy... and loud... and wonderful... and loud. The funny thing is that I had heard him try the door and even asked Artist to double check it, but we both decided it must have been backswing on said dragontail. Oops.

So that was a fun conversation that ended up happening last night instead of this morning - he was sitting in the living room when Artist went to get us a drink, so I went to reassure him. I sort of explained it as “um, adults sometimes do some things together that you don’t have to worry about yet” and that mostly quelled the curiosity for now, but... eek.
 
I'm actually really proud of Knight - obviously the relationship between he and his mother and I has been complicated over the past few years, and one of the the things that made it worse was that when she and I were disagreeing on something, when talking he'd tend to word things in a way that (subconsciously?) took her side. This escalated things into fights pretty often.

(Apparently he thought he was being neutral. :confused:)

So we've had a few conversations about that pattern in the past month or so, once I figured out it was there. (Some of them were even with Joan there too, and turns out she had noticed it too.) And... the next time there was that type of discussion? he very visibly paused and reworded something that was gonna come out the way that pisses me off into something a LOT more clear about what she was saying vs what he thought of it. Yay learning.

Also Artist and I continue to be in the most ridiculous honeymoon stage. That is all.
 
Wow. New forum is definitely going to take some getting used to but it's great - I was really worried there yesterday because I was afraid the whole forum had gotten hacked or something and I was going to lose this whole record of the last few years of my life. On the other hand, being able to read this thing on mobile in a more streamlined way is going to be BRILLIANT. (I am... far more of an iPhone addict than I love about myself.)

Really my polya life is going more or less well. I mean, Artist and I are spending about... actually I think he's purposefully alternating between 1 and 2 nights a week with me which sort of works? I can't quite tell - 2 days every week might be nice but right now my kid is problematic enough that I can't really focus on him enough to make that worthwhile. I totally get while childfree person might not want to spend more time over here. The time we have is utterly fucking _exquisite_ so I'm ok with this, it's still WAY better than it was pre "that damn 72 days".I mean, 7 days a month is not that many more than 4 but there's just something about how we interact now that is more... _real_ and _solid_ than it ever was before.

The irony here is that I don't actually think that he's changed - it's me. I ended up being so very much more honest about how I felt about him because I couldn't not be... the sadness beat out the fear. And of course it turns out that he felt the same about me all along and is now just more open about saying so. It's so much more simple to be open with him these days though - there's no fear of rejection - hell I have less fear of rejection with Artist than I do with Knight.

And the problem with Knight is that if I express desire I don't know what the answer will be. So I avoid saying anything instead of seeking, which makes him sad (and honestly that's fair); on the other hand he only seeks me when I say something or it's playful and not sensual. And I don't know how to make that line up in a way that I can feel love off of that, when I - as I've said here before repeatedly and I may be wildly repetitive about - have a lover that touches me like I'm a god damn miracle ... or like he can use me at his whim... or somehow both at once and how the FUCK is that even a thing?

But despite everything I still *want* to have something closer to that with Knight - not exactly alike, of course, but something more intensely and consistently sexual. So very much want. And he knows that and can't? won't? be that person for me - so how do I (re?)teach myself that playful is still love, that I'm not just habit and obligation. He swears I'm not just a habit... I believe him in my brain but not my body, and I've always believed my body more than my brain. So when my body is saying yes we're touching but it doesn't feel like he NEEDS to touch me, how do I interpret that? And yet... philosophically that ought to be ok... sex is just an extra layer on top of all we are to each other so why does it feel like I'm dying when he can hold me and touch me like he wants to fuck me and yet... doesn't?!?

And I don't know what I should be doing about Ginger - we talk every week and text sometimes but I'm afraid the connection is fading a bit because there's no forseeable world in which we can touch... but she's beautiful and I want to bury my hands in her hair and kiss her till neither of us see straight. (haha pun not intended but I'm going to leave it). It's funny because in a lot of ways she's less like me than anyone I've ever romantically connected with and yet that's part of the attraction - something about having someone in my life who doesn't match my usual type is kind of lovely?
 
And I don't know what I should be doing about Ginger - we talk every week and text sometimes but I'm afraid the connection is fading a bit because there's no forseeable world in which we can touch... but she's beautiful and I want to bury my hands in her hair and kiss her till neither of us see straight. (haha pun not intended but I'm going to leave it). It's funny because in a lot of ways she's less like me than anyone I've ever romantically connected with and yet that's part of the attraction - something about having someone in my life who doesn't match my usual type is kind of lovely?

Ooof. The irony of coming back here and that being my last paragraph. ::sigh::

This morning I had a conversation with Ginger that wasn’t exactly surprising but still rough. We really were _just_ really starting to date when this whole bullshit virus hit - like my last date out in public with anyone was with her in March - and we’ve been trying to do sort of weekly video calls but it’s only sort of working, as I said before. So we had this whole thing of “we’re not really dating right now are we?” Like we’re still friends and the door is open for when all this is over but the not-actually-long-distance-but-might-as-well-be thing is just ... not working. I mean it was really very sweet in that she was very much in a ... "I really like you a lot but it's hurting me to do this" sort of mode - that's almost a quote - soooo... yeah. I don't know what that'll mean from a practical point of view, might mean fewer conversations but she also said she liked having them... so it might have been just a defining what we're doing sort of statement.

Women are confusing.

(And yes I'm bummed as fuck about this because she's lovely, and this whole thing was sort of a new experience for me, dating a woman who wasn't already part of my polycule. Fucking covid. )
 
How has it been six years since I start writing here and Knight and I are still in the same goddamn pattern? I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t even know what I want us to be to each other anymore.
 
Hey, that seemed like an opening for feedback. I'm sorry things are frustrating with Knight, and have been for so long.

There seems to be a basic incompatibility when it comes to libidos. He's a- or greysexual? And you're highly sexed. He can cuddle and that's all he wants, he likes that. For you, cuddling is arousing and so you constantly get frustrated.

Just because he likes to cuddle doesn't mean you should do that with him, if the result is intensely painful. You could just stop. Tell him it's not working for you. If he wants or needs cuddles with a woman, he could find someone else for this, right?
 
Hey, that seemed like an opening for feedback. I'm sorry things are frustrating with Knight, and have been for so long.

There seems to be a basic incompatibility when it comes to libidos. He's a- or greysexual? And you're highly sexed. He can cuddle and that's all he wants, he likes that. For you, cuddling is arousing and so you constantly get frustrated.

Just because he likes to cuddle doesn't mean you should do that with him, if the result is intensely painful. You could just stop. Tell him it's not working for you. If he wants or needs cuddles with a woman, he could find someone else for this, right?

Thanks for commenting. I don’t think he’s actually anywhere on the ace spectrum; we have discussed that and if anything he’d be more novelty seeking (freysexual?) than that (novelty was, I think, what was good about the swinger scene for him).

That would be a much simpler problem, really. I mean, yes, his libido is lower than mine, but we could work around that especially since Artist is in my life. I mean, part of the late night conversation that spawned that particular cri de couer was that we had a particularly honest conversation about how neither of us were really each other’s main sexual partners anymore and what if anything we wanted to do about that. Soooo there’s that. The _reasons_ for that are so myriad though - and if I’m honest it’s not just his problem or actions although I probably make it sound like it is here. I’m trying to be more honest with myself than that though so perhaps I’ll try and elaborate on the whole thing. Again. Going to post this and switch to computer instead of phone though before my thumbs fall off.
 
Oh, and before I get into the rest of this - it really isn't that I don't want to cuddle. It's that I want to know what's going on before it starts - is this going to be cuddling? is this supposed to lead to sex? and we fail at communicating that. Not even always that I think it's going to be sex - the other night I thought we were just cuddling and Knight thought it was more like foreplay and then was confused when I wasn't in a sexy mood later, since I had been actively trying not to be aroused because I do want to be able to cuddle him nonsexually.
 
(Part 1 of 2, I hit the character limit.) But anyway. So this is a bit of a multi-thousand-word brain dump mostly because I'm trying to work it out for myself - I should have written this yesterday (or even earlier, in the case of part of this) when the conversations were fresher in my head. I ended up spending most of the day yesterday, though, in the kitchen learning to make Sichuan food. (Side note? holy fuck it was good - I was in the kitchen for like 6 hours but for once my ambitions and my execution lined up. Anyway.) (Further side note, Artist was here for one of MiniMe's nuclear meltdowns and my less than graceful parental response over it and didn't think I was a terrible person, in the way I am always afraid I am.)

The thing is that in some ways, it's actually ok that Knight and I are not each other's *main* sexual partners - it's just that we (yes both of us) still want to work out where our compatibility in that area is. Especially me, I think, just because I don't know how to have a romantic relationship that's not also fairly intensely sexual - sex without romance? Easy. Romance without sex? ehhhhhhhhh while I know that works for many people and that's great, I'm not sure I know how it works for me. But we can both acknowledge that we probably have more baseline compatibility with our other partners, in bed, than with each other.

As I've mentioned before, here, it's not that we *never* have sex, it's just not really quite enough for me and more importantly, I think (I could live with the frequency) it's not the kind of sex I want. I'm torn on whether those desires are realistic though - part of me says I'm asking too much, part of me says "clearly I have this kind of sex elsewhere so why shouldn't I have it here?).

There's... OK. A lot of sex therapists write about the difference between arousal and desire, and the difference between responsive desire and spontaneous desire (and I think I'd posit a 3rd form, anticipatory desire, that doesn't exactly fall into either category. Knight and I's issues lie in the gray areas between all of those, and in the nuances of their expression.

(Definition time, at least for the purposes of how I use these words here: arousal = physical interest in / readiness for sex; desire = the state of mentally wanting/needing sex; spontaneous = desire for the other person just because they exist and they're sexy / you love them without any specific action on their part, responsive = desire arising from the other person specifically taking actions to arouse you or *doing* something, anticipatory = desire arising from the planning for a later sexual encounter or from the sort of flirtation/teasing that is explicitly not meant to lead to an immediate sexual encounter. Think being turned on now by sexting about your evening's plans, or from a bit of groping early in the evening when you're going to have sex later.) Oh, and for me sometimes sexual intensity feels correlated to amount of desire, whether or not it is to my partner - so slightly rougher-into-borderline-kinky play feels like there's more desire to it - and thus greater emotional intensity? - than mellow or sensuous type sex.

For me, when things are going the way I *like* them to, desire precedes arousal - a lot of it is anticipatory, some is responsive and specifically responsive to my partner's desire. In fact most of the time arousal actually springs more from anticipatory and responsive desire than from actual physical action, especially from my partner's desire. Like, in the right circumstances I can be already turned on and basically ready for sex before things even really get started - all the foreplay happened mentally and/or physical foreplay is about *increasing* arousal rather than creating it. Another side effect of this - or perhaps cause of it - is that I'm far more able to have sex in a mode where I'm the pursued instead of the pursuer, very much NOT the initiator. I mean, I can/do occasionally initiate sex but 1. I have to feel confident that I'm wanted back and 2. I really want there to be some switchover moment where I feel like ok, now that things have gotten started, my partner can takeover and take the lead and I can feel more like an object of desire than necessarily the person DOING the desiring.

And I *know* that that dynamic, or at least insisting on that dynamic all the time, is kind of problematic. I often blame it on being submissive, but I don't think that's really it - I think a lot of it comes from typical heteronormative programming for sure, and the rest is a baseline lack of confidence in my own sexuality and trust in my partner's no, specifically in Knight's desire for me - and I very much don't want to have sex (or even have a relationship) where someone else is just going through the motions. That's scared me since before Knight was even in my life, truthfully. My parents were in a sexless marriage for so many reasons, none of which I should have known about as a 12 year old but nonetheless I did... and I was always afraid that sort of thing would sneak up on me in the future and I'd miss the signs and find myself living this song (which I remember playing over and over and over as a 9th/10th grader). Add to that a partner who I know is a people pleaser who I can easily see going through the motions just to make me happy (and even if he sort of is that should be ok, or at least I've argued that consent that stems from wanting to please a partner rather than immediate physical desire is still consent... yet I can't seem to allow myself to be in the recipient in that same space.)

For whatever reason (we haven't talked about it as much because we've never needed to, other than talking about how astonishing the energy between us continues to be), Artist seems to live in that same space in terms of desire. He plays with the anticipatory desire games with me, seems to intrinsically understand how my responses work, and I've never ever ever doubted that he was only doing things to make me happy. Hell, because of the way our dynamic works it sort of feels like it doesn't matter whether what we're doing results in his immediate pleasure because it's so clear that he likes having a level of power over my responses, so there's a kind of desire there somehow whether or not there's immediate arousal on his part. Too much information, I suppose, but this feels relevant - a not uncommon thing between us is for us to have *just* had PIV sex and for him to then decide that, despite me being sure I can't possibly have any more orgasms, he thinks I should have a few more and I do. And we seem to be incapable of staying in a sensuous or mellow space for the entirety of an encounter, the intensity pretty much always ramps up to rougher sex than where we started. There's a feedback loop between us that's practically tantric - I swear sometimes I feel his orgasms as much as I do my own.
 
(Part 2) But then we come to how Knight perceives and experiences sex. For him, desire mostly follows arousal - so deciding to have sex is from a mental place of "that would be nice" rather than from "I need to do this" (that description is straight from our conversation, not my perception). He gets too stressed / in his head, between work and parenting, to do anticipatory desire-building - like he almost needs to figure out how to relax before even thinking about sex, but by the time he's relaxed enough to want sex I've already given up on any potential for the evening, or if we do anything I'm starting from zero which takes forever, frustrating both of us. And some of the ways in which he tries to increase arousal, and to some degree closeness with me, end up alienating me instead. I've mentioned his hotwife-type kink a bit here; I don't share it but I'm willing to indulge it sometimes via storytelling (yes I have consent for this) because it tends to lead to about as much intensity as we ever get - which isn't a lot by my standards but it seems that level of intensity for him doesn't coordinate to style of sex in the same way. (I made a comment about how we always have sort of mellow sex and he was surprised by it as his perception of it was very different. :🤦:) Problem is I'm not willing to indulge that particular fetish ALL the time as it feels like my experiences are being used as personalized porn - and while sometimes porn is a fun indulgence, watching porn also feels like it makes desire and the resulting sex something external and not based in the actual relationship between the people actually physically involved.

I feel like I indulge his kinks too much because I'll take what I can get; he feels like he never gets the sex he wants because he wants me to be more aggressive / pursuer; I feel like I never get the sex I want because it never snaps into intensity. So we all go around the frustrated merry-go-round, and end up not having sex because we want different kinds of sex and want to arrive at having it differently - and every circle of the merry-go-round makes fixing it more unlikely, somehow - in the back of my head (and I think his too) we keep arriving at "we must not be having sex because the other person doesn't want to have sex", making initiation less likely and sex worse, lather rinse repeat.

With anyone else I'd have given up long ago... but I still love him, and there's just enough chemistry, just barely enough desire and connection that I can still see how, if we ever managed to get on the same page, we could still have something really good in terms of physical relationship. But how to get there? I can *almost* see a path of being very deliberate / mindful and purposeful about building something that might work - something akin to tantra without the woo? The mindfulness might work because clearly our instincts, when it comes to each other and sex, are either corrupted or non-existent, so if we could get past those... it's not how either of us experience sex by nature, and maybe that's the point.
 
OMG. Just reading that made me bored, upset, and tired. I hear you saying there is "just enough chemistry..." But to be perfectly frank, from this and other things you've written for many years now, I say there really is NOT enough chemistry.

You want to be pursued. That's perfectly fine. Maybe it's kink/D/s stuff. Maybe it's societal programming. Personally, I honestly believe that testosterone makes men more likely to pursue, and lack thereof makes women more likely to enjoy being the prey. I'm 65. I might've been born in the Stone Age, but I've dated/fucked lots of younger men in the last decade or so, and it still rings true to me, even with less patriarchal, perfectly-hip woke men.

I hear that Knight has this damn hotwife kink, and it's not your kink. And that's OK, and you should respect yourself enough to not do it out of kindness, thereby disrespecting your integrity. If you did it as a gift and really enjoyed the giving, that would be different. But you seem to feel objectified by it, and that's NOT OK.

And the weird (sorry, I am not being judgmental, I don't mean to be hurtful) "need to know" if any given cuddle is just cuddling or foreplay... If you two haven't figured out, learned, or become able to signal what's going on by now, again, to be perfectly honest, it's not going to change.

Pixi likes to cuddle and also she likes sex sometimes. I have learned to not get my hopes up for sex every time we cuddle. I've learned to be in the moment. Sometimes I escalate the cuddle to sex (or try to), sometimes she does, and sometimes we both love the cuddle, and it's completely sufficient. I don't need to "figure out" what it is. If I want to escalate it, I try. Usually I can get an orgasm out of it. And... sometimes Pixi will enable me to make it sexual, if I need that, while herself remaining unaroused, but it never feels like a pity fuck! It just feels super loving. It feels like a gift, like a lovely birthday gift, if that makes sense. She's very pleased to give. She's a giving girl. And she's crazy about me, and she loves my strong libido somehow. I think she's like, proud to be with a person who is so sexual.

What can I say? What you have with Artist is so enviable! There must be some reason you keep torturing yourself, hoping Knight will... change somehow, and become more sexually assertive. I'd have given up long ago and just shut the barn door. I'd de-escalate it from romance to best friends, and just call it a day and stop feeling there is something wrong with that.
 
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I mean thank you for reading my brain dump, I can see why it would be tiring to go through. I hear you on why you would de-escalate; I think we even tried that for a little while but it felt even worse - yes philosophically there wouldn’t have been anything wrong with that but it just didn’t actually reflect our feelings.

And the thing is that despite all this, what I have with Knight is _also_ enviable in different ways, so that’s why I’m stubborn about trying to find some middle ground.

At its base, this is a communication problem not a sex problem, I think. Maybe I just hope.
 
Ah. I realized the other thing that makes me keep trying - and this IS a thing that has changed in... the past year definitely, maybe only the past six months. I have a terrible habit of eliding different time periods together and not acknowledging that if I can change someone else can change too, which is part of where my commentary about the past six years is from. I mean a lot of things have happened to both of us in those years!! And like I said before that brain dump, I have not been particularly generous in figuring out where I fucked up in all of this, and not just blaming him

And I don’t communicate well. Like that is, I’m coming to realize, an absolute fact. I throw lots of words at things but very very often I don’t realize that what I said/meant and what Knight heard (and probably other partners too) have very little in common because I spell out A B and C and expect the person I’m talking to to hit Z by implication.

I’m not sure I had ever spelled out before, oh, last week maybe? that the hotwife thing made me feel objectified. So Knight knew it wasn’t my favorite thing, but didn’t know about the emotional content of it - and because when we did play with it I did get turned on and we did have sex that wasn’t immediately obvious. I can’t actually blame him for not being psychic as much as I want to. Come to think of it, I suppose that level of “yes I’m doing this and even enjoying it but I am not as into it as I want to be / my partner thinks I am” is _exactly_ what I’m afraid of from him. Perhaps that’s part of the root of my fear.

Honestly I never thought of the “wanting to have a plan” thing as weird - I mean I suppose it might be. I keep trying to set up my life to avoid rejection completely, over compensation for RSD probably. I just don’t want to get it _wrong_, y’know?

The biggest thing is that he’s trying. Like it actually bothers him as much as it does me that we aren’t connecting in that realm. So.
 
It wasn't tiring to just read your post. That was fine. It was the difficulties you deal in that seemed tiring, because they are frustrating and you seem to keep trying to fly a broken kite. I appreciate the updates. I'll come back to address those in a bit.

Again, I'm not trying to be judgmental, just to understand.
 
That makes sense - to continue your analogy it's more that I'm trying to find the kite repair kit. ;)

And as I suspected *might* happen after last week's conversations - we actually committed in advance last night to spending time together and planning for sex before, like, 11 at night and very specifically didn't drink (more than like a glass of wine at dinner) beforehand. And the combination of being more him being more deliberately present AND me knowing what the intent was (so I could purposefully interpret some of the ambiguous transitional bits between "cuddling and watching a tv show together" and "actual foreplay" as intentional rather than accidental) led to a much better result. Progress! :D (now, to repeat on a reasonable timely basis... )
 
That makes sense - to continue your analogy it's more that I'm trying to find the kite repair kit. ;)

And as I suspected *might* happen after last week's conversations - we actually committed in advance last night to spending time together and planning for sex before, like, 11 at night and very specifically didn't drink (more than like a glass of wine at dinner) beforehand. And the combination of being more him being more deliberately present AND me knowing what the intent was (so I could purposefully interpret some of the ambiguous transitional bits between "cuddling and watching a tv show together" and "actual foreplay" as intentional rather than accidental) led to a much better result. Progress! :D (now, to repeat on a reasonable timely basis... )

OK. So, there is something great (emotionally? intellectually?) between you and Knight. And it makes you want to have sex with him. And he sometimes actually wants to have sex with you. Not just with "imaginary hotwife you." But you think you expect him to read your mind. You aren't sure he puts the A+B+C that you're saying together to make Z. So you need to ask him to repeat back when he heard, and correct him, until it seems he really understands.

And sex doesn't ever happen between you 2 spontaneously. So you both need to plan. You need to talk about it, in unmistakable terms, and he needs to not drink too much. And all this effort seems worthwhile to you.

Whereas, Artist just comes over and you feel beautiful and completely desirable to him. And he just takes you and brings you to Cloud 9 for hours on end, and there is no effort on your part except to be cute and willing. And this has been going on for 5-6 years.
 
That's a pretty good summation, yes. (Plus or minus the occasional me sending risqué selfies or somewhat X rated texts, but that's barely effort because it's fun in and of itself.)

I suppose that in some ways that it probably doesn't make sense from the outside, as to why if I have this relatively simple to experience relationship over here, and it's wonderful, why I would continue working on something that's less than ideal right now... I do sometimes wonder the same, obviously. But every so often things do work and when they do it feels *right*, like this is how it's supposed to be between us.

Maybe that's just 20 years of habit, but I think if that was all it was I'd have given up by now.

Maybe it's just that even if the sex is not hours of multiple orgasms, there's something in the way his hand curves around my hip afterwards that makes all the drama worth it.

Maybe it's just... I almost wish I could post a picture here (yes, I technically COULD post it but if I did I wouldn't be able to delete it later, unlike my profile picture) that I keep around as one of my favorites. Knight didn't notice it was being taken, though I was looking at the photographer... instead he's looking at me and he's got this smile that looks like he's thinking I'm the most amazing person to ever exist. It's not a recent picture, 2010, and our lives were a bit less complicated then (pre-child, pre-polyamory, and both our career and hobby lives were at a high point), though we did still have some level of fights about sex. My point here is that regardless of those fights and those complications, there's a level of love there that I don't even have the words to describe...

... and once you've been loved like that there's no way to ever ever ever give that up without doing everything you can not to, especially when it feels like you're so close to making it everything it *ought* to be.

Meh. I got poetic rather than practical, but I suppose that happens a LOT in this blog.
 
Yesterday was entertaining in a “well, that’s a universe I wouldn’t have expected” sort of way. Mini-me’s birthday is this week (9!!) and Knight really wanted to do something better for it than we did last year - between Covid-19 making this year suck, and mini-me’s last birthday getting lost in the days around my father in law’s death, it just... yeah. The only problem with that is that I’ve sort of been in “I don’t want to do __anything__ in weird socially distanced mode, so I was having a hard time getting into the planning of it. But Knight did everything except bake the cupcakes and we ended up setting up the medieval pavilion in the front yard and having pizza and cupcakes and nerf gun battles with MM’s best friend, friend’s brother, and then Knight and Artist and another friend of ours who lives around the corner.

The thing I would have never expected is that my mother in law was hanging out and reasonably cool with - if bemused by the “grown men playing with toys as much as the kids” - Artist being there. They had met before, and that was fine, but if you had asked me a few years ago whether that was a thing that would ever happen I’d have laughed for days.

Guess 2020 bingo isn’t all bad?
 
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