A few weeks ago, I pulled a back muscle when I was lifting a case of water. What? Water is heavy. And, sloshy. After it happened, I told my boss that you never realize how much you use your back until you can’t use it anymore.

On Wednesday night my husband suffered a grade 3 rupture of his gastrocnemius, which is a fancy way of saying he badly tore a big muscle in his calf. He was shooting hoops when it happened. Okay, not so much shooting hoops as he was coaching fifth-grade, girl’s basketball. What? Dribbling around 11 year old girls is hard. Especially if you’re 38.

Since then, he has been on crutches and unable to do much. And, let me just say that you never realize how much you use your husband until you can’t use him anymore.

Every single morning, rain, shine, sleet or snow (in Ohio, it’s mostly the rain, sleet and snow part) he walks our dogs. The 11 year old Labrador could probably survive without her daily jaunt, but there is no doubt that she is in such great shape because of my husband, so we like to keep her active.

However, the one year old Labrador, Daisy, needs this exercise. She needs it like I need water, and air and beer.

Every day, my husband walks three miles with the dogs. They run off-leash most of that distance and likely cover twice the ground he does. Then Daisy comes home with her thick tail whacking everything in its path, she grabs a toy, slobbers on my jeans and looks at me as if to say, “I’m just getting warmed up, lady. Let’s play!”

Thanks to my husband’s injury, for the past four days I have been walking the dogs. If you can call it that. It’s more like getting pulled down to the park, letting them off-leash, then running 200 yards through shin-deep snow, in my big, clunky snow boots, to get Daisy because she has run off to steal another dog’s ball.

It is exhausting and after only four days, my body is sore. My left hand is blistered, my ribs feel bruised, I have shin splits and my thigh muscles are like jello. It’s a workout like none other.

I’m actually kind of hoping that I rupture my gastrocnemius.

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It’s not what you think.

His mother isn’t my mother and his father isn’t my father. We aren’t related, by blood, in any way.

However, I am married to a man who is the ultimate competitor. A man who always has to be right. And, of course, there is the teasing and knowing just what will drive me crazy…and doing all of those things on purpose. More than anything, there is his enjoyment of doing anything “kid-like”.

On Saturday, we took the kids sledding. Did I anticipate that my husband would come up behind me, tackle me to the ground and then shove snow in my face? Or, that he would put himself on a toboggan with two kids in order to be the heaviest, and therefore the fastest, sled on the hill?

Did I realize that he would make our SUV do doughnuts on the ice in the empty parking lot until our daughter was car sick?

Did I know that if I asked him whether he was going to smack his gum for the entire car ride that his reply would be, “Only if it irritates you”?

I should have.

My husband is kid in a 38 year old body. Don’t get me wrong, he’s responsible and he works hard, but he would rather spend the day having light saber fights with our son, or taking our daughter to see Avatar in 3-D while I stay home with the grumpy seven year old, a barking puppy and an old dog with a bladder infection. Not that I’m bitter about it.

In all honesty, I love it. My husband is the reason that our kids are kids. He is the one who plans the trips to amusement parks, takes them for bike rides and forces me out of the house on the coldest day of the year to listen to our children giggle on the sledding hill.

He is the person who took our children on a wild ride down the street on a furniture dolly that he pulled with a moving strap. He is the guy who took us fishing and had the patience to load the lines on all the reels, then redo every one of them when we (okay, I) managed to tangle them on our first casts.

He took our 11 year old daughter on a zipline canopy tour through the forest, he has gone skydiving and white water rafting and done all the things that I am too scared to do. My husband is instilling his adventurous spirit and enthusiasm for life in our children.

And if that means I have to put up with some gum smacking, then bring on the bubble gum.

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My mom is known for being ever-so-slightly off on her pronunciation of certain words. Home Depot isn’t pronounced, “Home DEEP-oh” but, “Home DEP-oh”. “Nickolodeon” is “Nickolode-UM”. And once, when someone was talking about the song “Back in Black”, Mom started singing, “I want my baby back, baby back, baby back…”. You know, the Chili’s song.

It turns out that my seven year old son takes after his grandmother. Most noticeably, when he calls his AquaDoodle a “croc-a-doodle” or when he says, “I love you as big as the whole, wide wheeled“.

But yesterday, he was more than just a little off. As my husband was eating popcorn my son looked into the bottom of the bowl and saw the leftover kernels, then he looked at his dad and asked, “Are you going to eat those pimples?”

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I have been known to do unusual things after taking Ambien. What is remarkable about these things is that I often have no recollection of them. Luckily I don’t eat, drive or call people. Shout out to my big sister! Put down the phone Trish!

Mostly, I just write. As it turns out, I did some of that last night. I vaguely remember penning notes to my two children and to my husband before I went to bed. I know they were love notes, left for them to read when they woke up. If you had asked me what those notes said this morning, however, I would have been clueless.

So sometimes there are brief remembrances about the previous evening, but not always. I logged on to Twitter today, and had absolutely no memory of leaving this update last night:

A hallucinating, crazy woman in the bed and a woman with legs made of turkey behind the door.

My husband is one lucky guy.

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