Well … as you can see from the post below, our mail did, indeed, arrive yesterday. In my quest to stay ahead of LightGirl I am now on page 423 of the HBP. She is somewhere in the low 100’s. But that is okay. She reads during the daylight hours, I get the hours after sundown.

But something else arrived in the mail yesterday. Something much smaller, yet I think really much more important. It almost got lost. But it’s impact will be felt in my life for much longer. I hope it will be felt in LightGirl’s life for a long time too. It is an invitation. The return address on the envelope was foreboding and confusing … something Naval. And we don’t know anyone in the Navy. LightHusband’s cousin is in the Coast Guard, but he is stationed in California and this return address was here in DC. So what on earth could this be? So I opened it. Oh … right … I forgot. My cousin’s wife is still in the Naval Reserves. And this is an invitation to attend her change of command ceremony on August 6 at Fort Belvoir. She has earned the right to command a mobile construction battalion. I’m going to go to this. I think it’s wonderful. She has 4 children LightGirl’s age and younger. She and I were pregnant together with our first children and our second children … but then she went on and had more. And she competes in triathlons. And she commands mobile construction battalions in her spare time!! And she is beautiful.

But to me what is important about this is not that she can do all of this, or that she does do all of this. But that she has refused to let society define her … she has defined her role in her family for herself and continued on with the things that are important to her. She has figured out a way to do “both/and” and done it rather spectacularly. She has managed to stay home with her children, but not at the expense of herself. So I will go and celebrate this with her … but quietly off to one side … because that kind of thing is not done in my family (at least not that side of it).