This house needs more estrogen.

It's so true, what they say. "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got til it's gone." (Well...I don't know if they say that, but Joni Mitchell certainly says it, and I believe her.) I grew up in a household full of women. At one point during my adolescence, there were five of us living together, my mom, two of my sisters, one teenaged friend of my sister, and me. No men. It was paradise. And then they paved it. And put up a parking lot.

Now I am the sole female inhabitant of my home, and sometimes, it's lonely. Don't get me wrong, I love my boys. But...they're such...boys. All the time. Day and night. So much video game playing and wrestling/punching, and sarcasm, and dirty feet.

Tonight, Eliot is at his dad's house, so I figured I could sneak in some super selfish girly me time. I was going to watch Muriel's Wedding, work on some embroidery, take a long coffee break with a good book. Ahhhhh, bliss. Quiet. Quiet house. Peaceful.

I failed to factor this into the scenario:

The remaining Y chromosomes. The ones to whom a childless house means a house in which one can play marathon M-rated video games, trash talk one another, and be generally loud and obnoxious.

Please know that these photos were not taken at the same time. It's just that these two have occupied the exact same space for hours. Hours. The exact same space.

And the running conversation goes something like this:

M1: "Any good guns? The surplus rifle? Oh, yeah! I'm buying the surplus rifle.
Oh my god, instant kill! This gun is amazing. I'm dealing 40 damage to this mo-fo.
He regenerated!"
M2: "What? We killed him!"
M1: "Kidding. I just wanted to scare you. Is this level eleven? How do you throw grenades?"
M2: "R1. I leveled up. Did you?"

Their voices are punctuated by explosions and gunfire and video game person screams erupting from the television. And so on. And so forth.

So much for Muriel's Wedding.

The thing is, I'm not a girly girl, by any stretch of the imagination. I don't wear makeup. I don't wear perfume. I don't "do" my hair. I usually don't shave my legs. I'm domestically challenged. I can't cook. I'm lazy about keeping things clean. My inability to perform my assigned gender does not mean I revel in "boy" things, however. Sometimes (tonight especially), I dearly miss the smell of perfume lingering in the upstairs hallway. The co-mingling scents of lotion, hairspray and floral or fruity shampoos in the bathroom. I miss the freshly washed lingerie hanging over the shower curtain to dry. The high-pitched laughter. The hum of my mom's sewing machine, and the smell of whatever wonder she had in the oven. The routine of getting ready for the day, squeezing past one another in the hallway, hoping against hope there would still be hot water for the shower, raiding my sisters' closets, finding someone willing to braid my hair.

No one ever yelled, "I have an incendiary shotgun!" or demanded, with a snarky grin, "Pull my finger!"

*sigh*

I think my best bet is to barricade myself in my craft room with some sewing, plug in my earphones and turn on the Florence + the Machine Pandora channel on my phone. I need to find some female companionship soon...