You say neurotic like it's a bad thing.

I've noticed that if you tell me that you have a weird little quirk, I immediately adopt it as my own. So if you have any little neurotic twitches, please for the love of God, don't tell me. I now have so many it's hard to keep track.

For example, when visiting Scott's family over Christmas, my sister-in-law asked me to hand her a glass out of the cabinet. I had been passing out plastic tumblers to the kids, so I handed her one. She told me, "No, a glass glass. I have this thing about drinking out of plastic." Until that moment, it had never crossed my mind to not like plastic glasses, but by golly, I have not grabbed a plastic glass since.

Similarly, a friend told me she never drinks the last bit of milk; she'll open a new gallon and leave the last of the other gallon for somebody else to finish. I have no idea why she does that; maybe she once had a roommate that drank out of the jug. But now I've got it in my head that the last bit of milk in the container is undesirable, if not downright unfit for human consumption. I keep meaning to ask her how she knows when she's gotten to the icky milk. And is it okay to give my kids the icky milk? I have a hunch that it's not okay if they're just drinking it straight, but I'm undecided if it's okay for cereal. And is it presumptuous of me to have hunches on the details of someone else's quirk?

Some quirks skip a generation. My mother and daughter are both convinced that bathroom water tastes different from kitchen water. I think they both taste...wet, but whatever. Who am I to argue with someone's sincerely held belief? I'll tell you who I am; I'm the tired mama tromping back downstairs between bedtime stories to fetch a glass of water with ice. In a glass glass, thank you very much.