"Did I used to put my head here?" she asked, even though she knew the answer, that this is a dance we do.

"Yes, right here on my shoulder. And then, finally, you would sleep from 5-7 am."

I remember those days, dragging myself to work to pay for diapers and formula and daycare. It was a dark time.

She rests her tween head on my shoulder now. I vow to stay for five counts of one hundred.

I feel her body grow heavy, begin to twitch.

I remember those days when her body was only two feet long, cradled against me. The relief I felt in her sleep, which meant my sleep.

I told her she used to shove her nose into my neck. A few days ago she tried, her head bigger than my neck. I'm no giraffe.

"Not enough room," she said.

My girl is too big to bury her face in my neck. I understand this truth more than she does.

I am glad it still occurs to her to try.

It will be hard to show her I'm only human.

"You are the party," she said.

We were in college. I'm sure I was crying over what the kids now call FOMO. It was easy to do at a party school when I was trying so hard to balance perfectionism and grades and social acceptance and my bad habit of seeing my self-worth reflected (or not) in boys' eyes.

It was a reassuring thought, then and now, when even at forty-one I occasionally feel left out of this get-together or that trip. When I think about places I can't get time away from work to visit or haven't had the money to see yet.

I am the party.

Repeat after me, and see if you smile.

Try moving through life expecting people to embrace you with open arms, knowing you will bring interesting stories and intriguing conversation. Pretend until it is.

Something about this little lie I've told myself since that night when I repeated her in Iowa City, most likely feeling rejected, then feeling better, buoys me even now.

Who cares what they think?
You care what you think.
We all die alone.
So believe, even for a minute, that you are the party.
Let yourself believe.

(This post originally appeared on BlogHer.com. And look, I made a Pinterest-y thing!)

Because I'm not like a professional blogger or anything, I forgot to take rock-solid "before" pictures, so some parts of the deck are already removed here.

In recent years, we realized the deck was getting seriously squishy. As in, someone might actually fall through soon.

We started scheming for affordable ways to replace the deck, because our taste is never in line with our budget reality. Then my father pointed out he had a pile of wood from what used to be a corncrib. He is unusual in that he also has a huge shed and a planer. Handy and unusual.

Last fall, we traveled to Iowa and spent a day planing down the wood. It is cedar and even though the boards were over sixty years old, they planed down really nicely.

After the old, gray, weather-beaten wood goes through the planer, a layer of wood is removed to reveal the beautiful wood underneath. Just like exfoliating! Magic!

Around early May this year, we rented a trailer, drove back to Iowa, and picked them up. We stuck them all in our garage and started ripping off the old deck. I highly recommend investing in one of these should you try to destroy anything as large as a deck, ever.

We rented a dumpster for one weekend, which meant it all had to come up, even though it was raining. Fun!

Once the deck boards were up and the railings and pergola was down, we realized the joists had not been supported with joist hangers and really we could use about twice as many. The boards had been attached with nails, not screws, so all those nails had to be pulled out or cut off, as well.

Pulling up, cutting off or pounding down thousands of nails was one of my least favorite parts of this project. Oddly, I found drilling holes and hanging joists very satisfying.

We added new joists in between all the old joists and added new joist hangers everywhere.

Then it was time to put the old corncrib deck boards back on top. We combined them with a few new boards, but luckily we had enough to make the floor almost completely upcycled.

Next, we installed the posts and built the pergola. It was hard.

Then we stained everything.

Finally, we added some of the more fun touches -- a vintage washtub we converted into a cooler, a Tiki Toss game, our shells from Florida, some new pillows, fake copper post caps with solar LED lights.

This project turned out to be far from free -- deck hardware and pergola boards are expensive -- but because my husband and I did all the work ourselves, we saved thousands of dollars in labor costs. And we both lost weight. So there's that. But we gained it all back by grilling and throwing back cocktails on our new deck!

To see more of our home improvement projects, see The Transformation of Chateau Travolta on Surrender, Dorothy.

Well, a year and a half after I wrote Help, My Cat Can't Pee on BlogHer, my sweet little black cat, Kizzy, almost died again from a total urinary blockage. Thankfully, before he blocked completely, we'd already decided to take the rather dramatic step of perineal urethrostomy surgery.

Cats become candidates for this crazy surgery after they've been blocked three or more times, according to my vet. A year ago, we thought we'd never do it. The surgery is drastic: The vet cuts off the cat's penis and tacks the sides of the urethra open wider with sutures. After those sutures dissolve, your cat has a nice wide urine highway right underneath his anus. (He's still a "he," technically, albeit a "he" with no penis.) (Genitals don't equal gender, anyway. Kizzy would like you all to know he is indeed, still a mancat.)

Kizzy went in for his third catheterization several weeks ago, and I talked to my husband before I took him about the threshold for surgery. Primarily we wanted to weigh how likely Kizzy was to face problems later in life, like incontinence or pain. Secondarily, we wanted to know how much the surgery would cost. We were already shelling out hundreds of dollars every time he was hospitalized for a blockage, so our tolerance for vet bills is high, but we weren't going to bankrupt my daughter's college fund or anything. Finally, we wanted to know if it would actually work.

I, of course, asked Dr. Google, and that's why I decided to write this post. I did see a lot of message boards, but I didn't find many blog posts that detailed someone's personal experience from beginning to end, and that's really what I wished for when I went looking.

After we agreed to the surgery (which in the Kansas City area cost around $1,200), Kizzy was scheduled for the next day. (He was already catheterized and they needed to let that flush out and make sure he was okay before they proceeded.)

The surgery itself was done by a vet who had done them before and had no real complications from any of her patients. She told me after the surgery that Kizzy had developed scar tissue again immediately after his catheter was removed for surgery prep, and she actually had to amputate the tip of his penis in order to insert the surgery catheter. So, in other words, he was 100% blocked and would've definitely died if we hadn't had the surgery. This removed any doubt I had about whether or not the risk was too great in retrospect.

Read the rest over at BlogHer!