When I FINALLY got the boys in bed this evening - a process that is arduous on a good night but enters the category of death-defying when Daniel is gone - I looked around the apartment at everything that needed picking up and I smiled: there is no doubt that boys live here. Toy cars were everywhere, of course, lined up in long rows like a monster truck show. Pieces of train sets had been dragged away from their rightful places by the resident 1-year-old. Balls of all sizes, an entire prehistoric ecosystem of dinosaurs and dragons, plastic hammers and rubber saws and tape measures and wooden screws, toy airplanes, dirty socks, Nutella-smeared sweatshirts, a dining table covered with runaway rice and spilled soy sauce, two microscopes, a worn blue blankie that didn't make it into bed, a kitchen sink full of sticky Lightning McQueen sippy cups and Mickey Mouse cutlery, and finger and toe smudges on the door frames reaching all the way to the ceiling.
Daniel called as I was tossing the last sock into the hamper, and we laughed about the goings-on of our day. His included a modeling session at the airport here in town, where he was asked to be the poster boy for the new airport brochure. He obliged, and was thus followed around by four to five gigantic cameras and asked to look like he was ordering food, buying a ticket, and seeking help from personnel (who were not actually personnel but professionals dressed to look like personnel). He said it was fun and hilarious, and also a little uncomfortable as he was given quite a few "who does he think HE is" looks from the lesser-fortunate foreigners who were not chosen to be the face of the airport. Must have been the dapper Christmas clothes.
As he divulged the details of his modeling debut, and which legs were missing from the bed in his hotel room, and his hour-long hunt on foot in the freezing capital city for a foot-long sandwich at Subway (something we can't get in our town), it dawned on me that marriage is awesome. I am this man's wife, I thought, this very good man with his new flannel shirt and his token-giving love for our sons, and his sincere interest in what I did today. I am the woman he calls when he is out of town, the woman he loves enough by now that he doesn't even think about it. We just are. We can't not be. Those parts of our lives that would be insignificant to others, and would in fact bore them to tears (like this blog post has bored you, I'm sure), mean the world to each other. I make sure he is eating enough to stay warm, and I make sure he knows that I'm proud of him, and that I want him here but I want him there, too, because we are in this together and we are a team. I won't be able to kiss him tomorrow evening at the stroke of 2011, but I don't need to. Any plain old moment in any plain old day with him is just as good as the biggest celebration in the world.
