Sometimes, it all falls into place.

Sometimes I feel like my life is perfect. Tonight, Cook took Dutch to soccer, leaving me and Skipper at home from 5 to 7:30. In theory, I could have prepared a nice meal, eaten it with Skipper while having pleasant bonding conversation, and put her to bed before Cook and Dutch got home. In practice, I decided to give her a haircut, put her in front of the laptop, and let her watch TV while I cut. This wasn't a great decision, and set us up for a delayed dinnertime, but it was great. At the moment, I truly couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing than hacking haphazardly at my kid's hair while she provided color commentary* for Danny McAskill movies.

Honestly, I was perfectly happy.

I had a lot of moments like that today. I moved wood chips around at Skipper's preschool for a while (working on fulfilling the "parent work hours" requirement), and enjoyed the vast and beautifully-managed garden filled with delightful things like amaranth, muskmelon, tomatillos, and some sort of "Andean tuber." I biked home with Skipper and a big package of toilet paper in the trailer, and it was sunny and beautiful, and Skipper was singing. I picked a lot of tomatoes. It was a nice day. I'm pretty lucky.

Anyway, this is Skipper's haircut. It's very lopsided - I love the left side (her left) so much that I can't bring myself to cut it shorter to match the terrible right side. She was watching "The Voice," which she thought was excruciatingly boring.

* "Wow! Mom, he's balancing on one wheel! Mom, I bet he had to practice a lot! Wow! I probably can't do that! Oh, he jumped!"