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little flowers that kind of look like a brain-fist?”
    “Here and there,” I reply, failing to mention the special order I place through North Shore Petal Pushers every week. Oh, no.
I
made Pistachio hydrangeas happen in North Shore. Not her. Those are
mine
.
    The clacking of Ashley’s heels echoes throughout the house. We pause for a moment to admire the wall of my black-and-white family pictures, artfully arranged in eclectic frames to form two letter Ks, the first backward and the second forward. (Sort of like Kim Kardashian’s logo, except not hideously tacky.)
    The K thing has . . . gotten out of hand. We gave Kord my maiden name, as that was always the plan. Then Dr. K was so tickled by all our first names beginning with that letter, he insisted we follow suit with the rest of the Littles, hence altering my preferred spellings of “Cassandra” and “Connor.” To me, the alphabetical matching smacked of the Duggars’ naming protocol, but Dr. K insisted. For Mother’s Day last year, he gave me a monogrammed piece of jewelry to represent all of their names.
    The pendant on the necklace reads
KKK.
    Betsy almost burst a blood vessel laughing when I showed her, while her African American driver, Charles, seemed decidedly less amused. I told them both it was the gesture that counted. The lovely, sweet, accidentally racist, completely tone-deaf gesture that now lives at the bottom of my jewelry box.
    “You make beautiful babies!” Ashley says and I can’t help but feel proud. She points to the photograph I took of Kassie in the North Shore Forest last fall, face radiant with joy as the leaves she’s tossing waft down to cling to her fair hair. “My fave.”
    Although the day in the shot wasn’t quite as festive as it appears—while I was trying to capture the perfect photo, Dr. K grew impatient and began to tap away on his iPhone, completely turning his back on the whole scene. I was aggravated he wasn’t more supportive, especially since he used this exact picture in an ad for his practice in the
North Shore Shopper
.
    Still, no matter what else’s happening around me, this photomontage cheers me up. I’m so fulfilled by the family we’ve created. Once in a great while when I’m frying in the blinding sun at yet another soccer game, or feeling my bum AND brain going numb as I sit on stiff metal bleachers in the natatorium, two laps into the endless fifteen-hundred-meter breaststroke competition, I wonder what my life might be like if I hadn’t taken this path.
    And then I’m overwhelmed by the guilt over my momentary wistfulness.
    But right here in this double-K-shaped display, where all my accomplishments are laid bare in funky metallic frames, I always return to my happy place.
    Ashley and I pass the sparsely furnished living room (I prefer to call it “minimalist”) and then the dining room, which is so minimal that . . . well, it’s actually empty, save for a dreamy handwoven rug in lush shades of crimson and ocher that Betsy found in Indonesia. (Betsy gives THE BEST housewarming gifts. Fact.)
    “Your dining table hasn’t arrived yet?” Ashley asks. “Ohmigod, how long has it been?”
    “Can you believe it?” I fume, hand balled into a fist on my hip in an approximation of outrage. “Who knew it took so long to ship the old-growth beech from Bavaria?”
    Truth?
    I have no clue how long it takes to ship old-growth beech from Bavaria, having not actually ordered any.
    I may not have been
entirely
forthright with Ashley about the status of our nonexistent dining room furniture as we developed a small cash-flow sitch last fall.
    See, our financial problems are twofold—first, we bought our place at the top of the market. I was on board with this particular location because no one who’s anyone lives west of Green Valley Road in North Shore, at least according to my sister, Kelly. Sure, I grew up in the more rural part of town informally called West North Shore, which was fine as