Last night, we were sitting around the dinner table trying to figure out what was weird about the soup. (Too much garlic? Too raw of garlic? Not enough salt? Not enough water in the broth? No idea. It just tasted a little off.) This is how we spend our free time, critiquing our team-effort cooking. Very fun.

Abigail—having given up on the game of What’s With The Soup—turned to Dane and I and asked, quite seriously, as though the thought had just occurred to her: “Hey, is it ever hard for you guys, having four kids?”

We allowed as how certainly, on occasion, four children can be difficult to manage.  Dane was quick to add that everything is hard sometimes—sometimes having one child is hard work. Sometimes having no children is hard work. Plenty of good things (work, art, reading, writing…fill-in-the-blank-ing) are hard sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes.

She wasn’t surprised, exactly, but she hadn’t been sure.

I don’t know if that means we fake competency really well, or if it means she just thinks we’d be the same crabby old grown-ups regardless of how many kids (and how much sleep) we had, or if it just means she had never thought to imagine life from our perspective, up until that very moment.

I’d like to think it’s the first, but I fear it’s the second and suspect it’s most likely the third.

In other news: hey, look, we got a tree! And then we made the nine-year-old carry it, for asking impertinent questions.

Just kidding. That’s not even our tree, she just wanted to see if she could stand one up. Also her questions weren’t impertinent, but you know, why else would we be making her carry a tree twice as tall as herself?