My husband is turning 40 this week.  I am sharing this with you because I am still 39 and I like to rub it in.  He is 45 days older than me and don’t you forget it.

We have spent the better part of our adult lives together and while we were maturing (and, oh my, given the amount of margaritas I drank on Saturday night, I am still deep in that process) we renovated a house, bought a couple of dogs, started a business and had two premature babies.

This man I married has seen me catheterized, watched my stomach get cut open twice to have tiny children removed and still loves me despite the fact that my thighs are bigger than his.

He has stayed at my bedside more times than I can count, held my hand as our son was taken to surgery over and over again and he has brought me the same flowers every spring for the last 16 years.  He also has coffee waiting for me every, single day.  Bonus!

He has always worked hard so that I could, first, be a stay-at-home-mom and care for our daughter and, second, be a stay-at-home-mom/nurse/therapist/pharmacist/advocate/insurance-wrangler for our son.  And, for the past few years he has plugged away at work so that I could blog (yeah, read that again) and take the time to find full-time work that feeds my passion.  I love my job and I couldn’t have found it without his support.

Though, I do hate sitting next to him on a plane.  Well, except for that one time when I took a Xanax for my fear of flying and he bought me two vodka and cranberries to chase it.  In that particular case, it was the best plane ride EVER.  So, he has that going for him.

He has one, very annoying habit…okay, maybe two or three…and I blame his seven sisters for the fact that he knows exactly how to make a woman angry.  Thanks, ladies, for getting him warmed up for me.

But, despite that harsh, grating noise he makes when he clears his throat, I’m happy that his parents didn’t stop at child #8.

Happy 40th birthday, Dado Fali.  I’m really glad that you were born.

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Yesterday my daughter performed in her school musical.  There were three performances at 10am, 1pm and 7pm.  I attended all three.

She didn’t have a lot of lines and she didn’t sing any solos, but she was in full costume and makeup, on a stage, in front of an audience and she was having a really bad day in the scheme of all things sixth grade.  I wanted to be there to applaud her.

After last night’s performance she asked, “Mom, you do realize that you sat through three hours of the same play just to watch me say a total of 27 lines, right?”

I replied, “Yes, I know.”  Then I asked,  “Didn’t you want me to be there?”

And, as well as any twelve year old can say that they are thankful for their mom, she smiled and replied, “Yeah.  I guess.”

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You know how you don’t get any sleep, and then your cold turns into a sinus infection/bronchitis mixture, and you spend your Saturday afternoon sitting in the cold watching an endless, sixth grade, softball game, which really wasn’t endless, but it WAS three hours, which is the same as endless, and the girls on the opposing team scream and chant the entire time, “We’re going to rally, rally, rally!  We’re going to rally, rally!” and you feel like you should go to confession because you wished they would lose their voices, then you take your obsessive and compulsive son to a monster truck show, and his latest tic is to sniff, sniff, sniff, SNIFF, SNIFF, and you take his noise-reducing earphones off to adjust them and he starts sniffing harder and completely freaking out that you are GOING TO MAKE HIM DEAF, and then he starts gagging, but you can’t go anywhere because you’re smack-dab in the middle of the row of seats and there is a wall behind you, so you do what any mother of an almost-nine-year-old would do, which is to put your hand under his chin and catch his vomit in your bare hand, but that’s okay because you have TISSUES and your friend has hand sanitizer, and then the young child in front of you stands up and yells, “Screw you!” to the announcer, and his parents LAUGH, and then you spend all day Sunday coughing up a lung because after you caught vomit in your hand, you sat in that closed arena and inhaled exhaust fumes all night and that goes really great with your asthma/bronchitis, sinus infection?

Yeah,  me too.

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April is a scary month.

Oh, sorry…let me clarify.  April is a scary month for my husband when he sees our bills.  April is when I redecorate.

When the sun finally comes back to Ohio after months of teasing us with the whole, I’ll come out, but only for a minute once a week thing, I get the urge to buy new towels.  I blame the lack of vitamin D.

But, it’s not just new towels.  I start refinishing furniture and painting walls, which leads to needing new rugs, then new pictures, and oh my, those candles don’t even match anymore!

I have lugged an armoire up the stairs and a treadmill down them.  My king-sized bed has been bounced around like a ball.  I hang blinds, buy new pillows and change cabinet hardware.  I pack stuff into boxes, store it in the basement, then revisit the boxes I packed the year before.  If the items fit into my new scheme, I pull them out.  If they don’t, then I try again next year.

Come April, changing things around becomes the only thing I think about.  If only it would translate to my eating habits and exercise routine because I’m pretty sure that wearing shorts would make me happier than having a whitewashed coffee table.

Then I wouldn’t scare my husband with the bills or when I get ready for bed.

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