life as we know it.

 {Christmas 2010}

I've spent two days going back and forth to the doctor's office, having holes dug in my skin and then watching the skin be sewn back together.

Yesterday, I paid $98 for flea medication for our dog, in the hopes that the three fleas we spotted jumping around our home can be easily tamed.

My mom and I finally took down baby shower decor (from two weeks ago) and set up the tables and chairs for a brunch I'm helping to host Sunday.

Jordan and I are looking for hotel rooms for JazzFest, which we bought tickets for at the last minute.

We're headed to New Orleans on Friday, my brother's graduation from FSU on Saturday, and a brunch -- and another baby shower -- Sunday.

Basically, my life is a little chaotic at the moment, and last night, as I watched my brother and husband turn over bookcases and chairs searching for a rather large skink that had slithered its way into our home, I couldn't help but laugh.

My mom and dad were sitting in our dining room chairs, lined against the wall in preparation for Sunday. They calmly ate their cake (in honor of my mom's birthday) and watched as Chet and Jordan tore apart the house, using cardboard boxes, rubber gloves, and "spider bits" to trap the purple lizard before it could crawl under another bookcase (my house is smothered in bookcases).

I lounged on the couch, trying desperately to ignore the pain coming from my thigh and arm, cringing every now and then as a book fell off the shelf or a picture frame shifted positions. Then, as the two wannabe-exterminators launched into a slew of Star Wars quotes and sound effects, as my parents quietly and calmly ate their cakes, as my living room began to look like a used furniture showroom, I just burst out laughing.

Uncontrollable, tears pooling in my eyes, can't stop, can't breathe laughter.

My dad saw me and started laughing too, and my mother came along shortly after. (Chet and Jordan were, as usual, blissfully unaware.)

And I gasped out, in between breaths, that my life -- my quirky, busy, only made for me life -- so often looks like a sitcom that I should be making millions. ABC should be paying me for this kind of hilarity.

But instead, I sit and fold clothes and wait in lines at CVS and get recognized by former classmates at the vet's office and catch skinks in my house using cardboard boxes and rulers. I host brunches and baby showers and never take decorations down and plan last-minute road trips and forget to read book club books and ignore phone calls and voicemails and watch old episodes of The Office over and over again.

"Sometimes I wonder about my life," muses Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail. "I lead a small life -- well, valuable, but small -- and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"

I've often wondered about that. Wondered if my life, like Kathleen Kelly's, is valuable, but small. And as a lover of books, I've asked myself: Does my life look like a book, or could the life I live on a daily basis make a decent story itself, a story someone outside my family would ever be interested in reading?

Some days, I don't know. I can't be sure. The days and hours and minutes are valuable, yes, but they do seem rather minuscule and mundane.

But there are other days and weeks that are so full, so crazy, so smothered in moments of hilarity and utter joy that I know: I am living a pretty good story. A story that one day, might make a pretty good book.

Yes, there are days when much of what I see reminds me of the books I love so much. But last night, as I sat with tears streaming down my face, listening to my brother and husband bond over everyday pest control, I realized that sometimes -- maybe most of the time -- it really is the other way around.