Boy, am I tired today– the kind of tired where you pour orange juice in your coffee instead of milk. And it’s only Monday.
In my new role as the company VP, I’ve been working longer hours and traveling more. Add to that the nightly routine of cooking dinner, supervising homework, bathing kids, packing lunches, setting out clothes, picking up the house, reading bedtime stories and setting the coffee pot for the next morning, and I’m exhausted. By 9:30, I’m ready for bed. I mean that in the fuzzy-pajamas-and-night-cream sense, not the Biblical sense.
Thankfully, my sweet husband sees how hard I’ve been working and he has stepped up his game. Normally, his version of cleaning the bathroom is spritzing with a spray cleaner; forget mopping and scrubbing with Comet. And, when he returns from a trip, he leaves his packed suitcase sitting on the bedroom floor until I break down and unpack it.
So, imagine my surprise when I returned from a Labor Day family weekend where he and the kids headed home and I continued on to a business trip. When I arrived at the house, his suitcases and the boys’ suitcases were unpacked and put away; the laundry was done; the house was sparkling; and, he had even taken care of dinner. It was a wonderful evening, but there was just one thing missing. It reminded me of this joke:
Two girlfriends meet each other on the street. “How is married life going?” one girlfriend asks the other.
“Amazing!”, she replies, “For the last couple of weeks, my husband has been such a great help around the house. He’s been watching the kids, cooking, doing the shopping, cleaning, and helping out with the laundry.”
“How did you convince him to do all of that?”
“He read an article in one of my magazines that said if a woman is less tired at the end of the day, then she is much more active in bed at night.”
“So is his strategy working for him?”
“Not yet. Every night, he falls asleep as soon as he hits the bed…”
