A few weeks ago you coughed directly in my face and it woke me out of a dead sleep. A blast of warm-ish air and little flecks of moisture. I reflexively shoved the offending air blower away from me with outstretched arms. You slept through it mostly and just grumbled a bit as you rolled away from me.

I hate it when you touch my feet with your feet, especially in bed. “Feet on feet!” I say. Feet on feet is a big no. You have this way of gently stabbing me with your toe nails on the soft underbelly of my arch. It is horrible. You think it is delightful.

Sometimes when I’m peeking at something in the oven and you’re standing at the sink we bump butts. There is not enough room in our galley kitchen for the whole family at once. I don’t mind.

There are times when your hair is really out of control and I hate it. When I tell you this in an annoyed way and you fluff it up even bigger and then make bird noises while doing a chicken head bob and pretend to be engaging in some sort of mating dance it makes me love you beyond human capabilities.

You don’t embarrass easily which is really great, but when you do you say, “Oh no! I’m embarrassed! I’m embarrassed!” like the only way you know how to express it is by sounding the alarm. I find this hilarious and almost 100% of the time the things you find embarrassing are the greatest most sincere parts of you. Well, sometimes they are when you fuck up, so I guess there is that. But at least your reaction is heartfelt!

For the entire time I’ve known you, you have never understood how to successfully put on your own coat. One time I prevented you from walking out the door with 1 kind of plaid button down and a different kind of plaid pair of shorts. And then there was that time that you walked around all day with a sock attached to the velcro of your rain coat. Life is better with a buddy.

Love is helping me to the bathroom in the middle of the night and standing next to me in the dark so that I can lean on your leg while I pee with my eyes closed and then shuffling me back to bed.

Love is waiting for me while I was a half an hour late from living work when I told you I could leave 15 minutes’ early when I got stuck in a meeting without my cell phone and then not even being mad about it.

Love is giving me the window seat on every flight even though being in an airplane is your favorite thing ever.

Love is letting me write about you on the internet in the most honest way possible and sometimes making you look like the bad guy (Which sometimes is who you are) but mostly just letting me share our life with the world and never questioning it and allowing me to be exactly who I am every single day.

Happy Valentines Day.

Anything I was ever good at (anything I ever succeeded at is more accurate… good at might be a stretch) was because I just sort of walked into it. Stumbled into it, through it, oh this is where I am now. Not that I didn’t work hard or make the best of wherever I was whenever I was, but so many experiences in my little world could have been absolutely non-existent if I had actually thought and planned and followed a play book. In college I just did stuff. I just up and got an internship. Moved to North Carolina for the summer, stayed on Wake Forest’s campus. It was insane and expensive and lonely and oh god so so so hot. I took a...

I feel overly sacrificial lately. Sharing my body, needing to be places, do things, put on the good face for others. The holidays, once you are a grown up, become about compromise. Would I have enjoyed spending the entire 2 week holiday hubub securely placed in bed? Staring at the wall? Doing nothing but getting up to pee every hour? Yes. Yes I would. What did we do instead? Had people in town, hosted and attended various Christmas celebrations, played tourist, bought a lot of cheese, ate a lot of cookies, ran errands, went to restaurants, and on and on. Good things, exhausting things, some things I didn’t feel like doing at all, but...

A few days ago I was secretly eating one of the chocolate bunnies that Kamel’s family  brings back for us from Mexico. And by us I think I really mean Kamel. I mean, I’m sure it is ok if I eat them too, but we all know that Kamel loves them the most most most. And then I thought about how sometimes the benefits of marriage are that I get the perk of being able to eat my husband’s special dessert when he isn’t looking. I mean, I could always have my own chocolate small furry animal, but I wouldn’t have known tiny chocolate mexican bunnies even existed if it weren’t for Kamel. It occured to me that these...

So much is written here and other places about the struggle of marriage. Sharing your life with someone – all of your life with them – is rough at times. It takes a lot of effort and thought, a lot of patience and kindness. But! it is also fantastic and absolutely worth all of the annoying, frustrating, tough times (if you’re in a good one). After I wrote the post on marriage not being the end zone, I received some comments abut how hard marriage seemed and how it doesn’t seem all that great from the outside. I think that happens because so much of what is talked about in mainstream society puts marriage as the happy...

Yesterday’s post, though honest and fraught with the reality of my swollen hot feet and sweaty knee-pits, bothered me all day. I kept thinking about how it wasn’t the post I should have written. How the lightening storm was great, but it was actually a small piece to a larger puzzle. I thought all day and even into my happy hour with Claire about how to say what I want to say, but I am still coming up blank. Since we’ve moved to Seattle things have been good, I have been happy, we have so many opportunities here, we have a much better quality of life, there are a thousand and one excellent things about our world right...