There comes a time ...

when you're making your grandmother's awesome meatballs with your sister and your domestic partner for your family's annual Norwegian Christmas dinner and you're all cozy and warm in her kitchen as the winter snows blow and bluster outside her window ...

when you're introducing your domestic partner to lefse, the grotesquely overrated Norwegian potato flatbread, at your family's Norwegian Christmas dinner and it turns out he finds it as bland and tasteless as you do ...

when you and your domestic partner are sitting with your family on Christmas Eve opening the dollar-store purchases painstakingly selected for both of you—not to mention the wooden basement-workshop monstrosities carefully made for both of you—by your niece and nephew ...

when your parents and sister and niece and nephew all buy Christmas presents for your domestic partner's developmentally disabled brother who lives with you ... even though they don't have to ... and even though he's spending the holidays with his other brother's family ...

when your domestic partner joins you and your parents and your sister's family for an official family portrait when you're all together for the holidays ...

when you're snuggled up to watch Nanny McPhee on one couch with a niece on your lap and a nephew under your arm and your domestic partner is on the other couch sharing a blanket with your mother as though he had always been a part of the family ...

when your niece and nephew go out of their way to sit on your lap—and even sometimes go so far as to force you to make a lap for them so they have another excuse to sit on it—for the entire five days (with very spotty Internet access which is why you haven't made any blog posts) that you're home with them in Iowa ...

... that you realize that everything you learned from the Hokey Pokey is wrong ... because this is what's it's all about.

I'm not in the habit of splashing my entire family all over my blog, but there is now official strip-mall-store portraiture of us—ALL of us—in black shirts and jeans as though we were a bus-and-truck company of beat poets or a troupe of mimes, and though we all agree that these are not the most flattering pictures of any of us—except for the kids, but then who looks at boring old adults when you have adorable kids in a picture?–the fact remains that this is my family and I love them: