My Better Half

I'm just sitting here thinking how much I love that my husband single-handedly takes on all of Annie's bedtime routine . . . even though it is fraught with screaming and kicking and crying and sometimes requires that he put her in a humane headlock to brush her teeth. This 20-60 minutes of the evening is mine. Usually I have to feed, change and get Ellie down during this time too, but typically at least a chunk of that time is mine alone. I get to check email, or do a load of laundry (less fun, but nice to do without an infant underfoot, or a toddler 'helping') or even get another 20 pages into the book I've been making little progress on this week. Can't imagine what I'd do without him.

I also love that even though he had to wake up before sunrise on my birthday to get to work for a 12-13 hour day, he'd set his alarm extra early (like before 5AM), so he'd have time to write me a birthday letter letting me know how much he loves and appreciates me, and have it waiting on the nightstand for me when I woke up hours later.

I love that there's more nights than not where we get to bed ridiculously late because we just couldn't stop talking and laughing, even though we both know we are overly sleep deprived as of late, and could pretty desperately use a good 7 hour stretch of sleep.

I love that he's such an amazing cook and always wants to try and learn new things in the kitchen. I especially love that he gets a craving for Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies at 9PM and we get to go make them together and eat dough while we stay up late. (He forbid me from cooking any of them though, thus 'ruining his dough'. I cooked up a batch the next day though, on my birthday. They were SO good. I don't listen really well.)

I love that we get to celebrate his birthday this week. The fifth one we'll celebrate together. And then he'll finally be 30 years old too. And can stop cracking all of his 'older woman' jokes. It's tough being four days older. (And yes, for those keeping track, every one of our birthdays are within two and a half weeks of each other . . . it makes it awfully convenient though . . . we can have one big family barbeque a year and we're all covered! And we just have to save a lot of money for Christmas, then we have almost a half a year to save up for all the birthdays, then a good six months or more to save for Christmas again. At least with all of the birthdays all bunched together, they're spaced well from other costly holidays!)