today is the first in a month of mornings that i’ll be waking up in the mountains of western north carolina. i’ll post more soon about our trip and the requisite en route adventure. but for now, let’s catch up on another amusing little episode, shall we?

a couple of weeks ago, andy and i, along with our raucous progeny, were speed-eating our way through dinner at el porton mexican restaurant. then, just as i was taking my first sip of my second margarita, a couple of high school girls, who were participating in some sort of a scavenger hunt, approached us with sombreros and a camera and explained that they needed a picture of a “normal american family.”

as you can see, not even the prospect of high school scavenger hunt fame can distract me from the lure of tequila. the next day, the picture appeared on facebook, and because the world is small, a mutual friend recognized us and tagged me.

but the point is, god help us all if our family is the picture of normalcy!

the monkey has a semi permanent “ear plug dread lock” in his hair thanks to his waxy blue plugs and embarrassingly infrequent showers (hello… doesn’t swimming count?). i still cut my hamburgers into quarters because my mom used to do this for me when i was little. in preparation for our current vacation, i couldn’t find one single toy to bring that was still in tact and had all of its pieces. for distraction purposes, i have given my infants tampons to play with at restaurants and my toddlers duct tape to play with on airplanes. my husband prefers to jog during the hottest part of the day, in what is arguably one of the hottest cities on the planet. our children were conceived through the miracles of science and are raised on a hodge-podge of common sense, superstition, tradition, book knowledge, and exhaustion-induced parenting moves.

but it is not just that our nuclear family is abnormal. we are the apples that have not fallen far from our eccentric family trees. my aunt, for example, is convinced that my deceased grandparents send us messages through blinking lights and other electrical anomalies. i wholeheartedly agree with her. andy’s dad has been known to buy enough plastic wrap at once to last for decades. we are aware of the longevity of such products because he proudly writes the purchase date on them with a sharpie and revels in this sacred “history” every time he is called to cover something up and put it in the fridge.

i would venture to say that i don’t even really LIKE people who seem to be living out the imaginary standard of “normal” living. i am much more drawn to the bizarre particulars that make people who they are.

i hope those high school girls won their scavenger hunt. but mostly, i hope that someday (and the sooner the better), they come to know that “normal” doesn’t really exist. there are many other standards one can employ to measure the quality of one’s life. take the amount of years that one uses the same roll of plastic wrap, for example!