Scenes from my house on this post-Passover Sunday night:

We are watching the Raptors game in our newly be-couched basement —

— Emily will tell you that we semi re-did the basement so she have her friends over for chills but the truth is that we needed to get the kids to not be afraid of the basement and to keep them out of our bedroom because my husband decided that he didn’t want a tv on the main floor because we are basically mennonite and the plan totally worked and now our children hang out down here and I get to re-claim my bedroom sanctuary —

— and giving Josh a Prince education because it shocked me to learn that my music lover (and he is, he really is – he’s the child who listens to vinyls, and the child who made us stay in the car to listen to the end of Stairway To Heaven because “that is just the right thing to do.”) had never listened to any Prince at all and Isabella The Hypochondriac is worried about at least one body part (tonight I believe it’s her jaw and her eyes “I for sure 100% have pink eye I know it in my soul.”)(She does not have pink eye) and Emily is snapchatting.

This is my life. It’s mostly pretty unexciting. But I’m pretty sure that’s what I like about it. I’m old and boring and I kind of like that the most exciting thing is that we finally ordered HBO so we can watch Game Of Thrones on the actual night in airs instead of having to avoid social media and download it (mostly legally) the next day.

It did get a wee bit exciting last week while we where on our yearly Virginia Passover pilgrimage and decided to spend the day at the Safari Park. It’s a destination we visit yearly, because how often can you make friends with budgies and FEED GIRAFFES and, well, get judged by llamas.

At the safari park there are explicit instructions about keeping your doors closed at all times and about not getting out of your car because even though some of the animals look harmless (albeit mildly judgey) and like to hang out with their heads in the feed buckets we hang out of the windows, many of them could eat my head in one bite.

Of course, as we were exactly three point five minutes into the trek — and just as a group of zebras went running right in front of our car (what’s a group of zebras called?) (A zeal of a dazzle, it turns out)(Thanks Josh my walking encyclopedia, even though he doesn’t know what encyclopedias are) — I got pulled into an emergency work conference call.

So there I was, with my family in the car, unable to get out without getting eaten like I was basically in Jurassic Park with my finger covering my mouth in the universal gesture for BE THE EFF QUIET (even though my kids are terrible at following this simple instruction)

desperately trying to act composed on a conference call and also, well, desperately trying to not vomit in my hands because a new fun thing I discovered is that when I spend lots of time trying to have conference calls and read off of my notes and riding slowly on bumpy roads watching animals, I now get a little carsick. (But at least I had a whole bunch of feed buckets?)

Exciting is overrated, but safari parks are pretty rad.