Brian, as a stay at home dad, probably has some of the jobs in our family that would not normally fall to the husband. And some of them are really crappy.
He literally is the one dealing with the most crap at our house. He is the chief cloth diaper washer. The boys tend to do most of their pooping mid-morning so he changes way more poopy diapers than I do. And although they are getting much more self sufficient, he still has to escort Grace and Haven to the restroom several times a day.
Besides the diapers, he also does most of the laundry, washing/drying and putting away. He sorts, and folds, and stacks, and then JoJo knocks it all on the floor, so he folds and stacks again. As you can imagine, we have a lot of laundry. I can hear the washer going into spin cycle at this very moment.
He does all the cooking. ALL. He does all cleaning up from said cooking. And all the grocery shopping for said cooking. Today we went to do our Thanksgiving grocery shopping. It was 9:15am, but our local store was already insanely packed. We thought we were being clever by going early, but lots of other clever people were there, too. Most trips to the grocery store end in Manny crying. You hand him some object over the course of the trip to keep him occupied and stop his crying (today it was a bag of Fritos), but in inevitably you have to take it away at the check out stand to pay for it. So the last few minutes of your shopping trip are pure Manny-screaming agony.
But the very worst job that Brian has, in my opinion, is mowing the lawn. A real man's job. When we were a fancy-free-dual-income-no-child family we had a lawn service come once a week in the summer and every 2 weeks in the winter. They would mow, edge, pick weeds, bag it all up for trash collection and be out of your yard in 20 minutes flat. Giving up our lawn service was probably one of the hardest budget cuts we had to make.
I despise yard work. It all goes back to the year my family moved into our house in Evanston, Wyoming. Up there, when you have a house built it does not come with landscaping. So my family spent many many days picking large river rocks out of the area where we were going to lay sod for the front lawn. That single event has ruined me for gardening. Every year I think I want to grow a few vegetables or plant some flowers and every year I lose interest after about 10 minutes.
Yesterday we got one of those highly annoying letters from our homeowners association "You have chosen to live in a beautiful community....." blah, blah, blah. Basically, it said mow you're stinkin' lawn and pick your weeds. We have this one crazy spot in our yard that has some crazy strain of grass that grows at an accelerated rate. The rest of the lawn could easily go another week or two, but this one spot has grass sprouts 1 foot high. And its right on the corner where everyone can see it. Including the housing association snitch. That old woman who drives around the neighborhood looking for things to write you up about. Long grass, moldy eves, mini-blinds turned the wrong way, American flags flown too close the sidewalk. Yep, these are all things I or others I know have been written up for. But I digress.
Brian had to mow today. I offered to do it for him and he looked at me like I was stupid. Like I couldn't possibly mow the lawn correctly. Like I might ruin the lawn, or the mower, or lose a limb in the process. And who am I to argue. If he wants the crappy job, I guess I'm just going to let him have it.
But just for the record, I don't just sit around the house eating bonbons. I am in charge of all things related to paper. All bill paying, all record keeping, all adoption paperwork. In fact I'm quite sure that Brian is allergic to paper. His eyes begin to water anytime he sees something that looks like a document. His throat begins to close up and he begins to gasp for breath if he is actually asked to file or look for or in any way actually handle a document. Knowing this, I can honestly say that if Brian had been in charge of our adoption paperwork we would have zero children right now. Brian only signs his name to paper, but otherwise he does not touch it. And of course, I am very very busy with baby kissing, hug giving and very important blogging :)
Oh, gotta go give a kiss! See you tomorrow night.
