Happy Birthday

Today is my loving husband’s birthday. I think that this is the first birthday he has had with quite so much vomit. As a special birthday surprise, I let him go to work while I stayed home with the childminder to help out with the sick children. The older you get the less fun your presents become.

I wanted to write about how wonderful my spouse is but I seem to have writer’s block. The knowledge that, any second now, someone will start to scream may be putting me off. Also, having a perfect husband isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. When other people complain about their husbands, I can’t join in, well, not unless I want to be really annoying. Ok, he probably isn’t perfect but I don’t think I know of anyone else whose husband is so much of a partner. When we’re drowning in baby vomit, we’re splashing in it together. When we’re up 14 times in the night we’re up 7 times each. When we have to take a day off work to mind a sick child, we take in turns. He washes, I sweep, he cooks, I clean, he folds, I put away, he sews, I hoover. I have never felt we were anything other than completely equal partners in the work of parenting and running a home. Even when I am annoyed with him, for gentle reader, difficult as it is to believe, this happens, and I mutter under my breath, I never mutter, “it’s not fair, I do everything” for at no level is that true. And it’s such an unexpected bonus because before I married him, I hadn’t tested his baby friendliness or his housekeeping skills in any depth. I knew that he was kind and good and loving and funny and clever and that he had an over-developed sense of duty and what was right. Little did I know that that last which could be so tiresome (oh trust me here) would be one of the best things in the long run.

Happy birthday, sweetheart.