I Heart the Husband

I'm not used to this. When my children were younger I stayed home with them. I did volunteer work and also had a Discovery Toy business that I ran from home. When they both entered school full time, I started working part time outside of our home. It's only been the last several years that I have worked full time. My husband has worked as a psych nurse for over 20 years, the whole time we've had kids. He was once our only income and even now makes twice what I do in a year.

Since my job for a non-profit has a lot of flexibility, I'm generally the one who has always stayed home with the kids when they've been sick or when there is no school. My husband has always been very supportive and "hands-on", but it just made more sense for me to stay home when needed.

Our roles have been changing since Kellen hit puberty. He needs his dad much more than he needs me at this point. When Kellen turned 13, his dad changed his work schedule so that he could be home in the mornings to wrestle Kellen out of bed and off to school. I'm still usually the one who is home after school.

Today I had a full day at work planned with people coming for job interviews and an important school meeting I was attending with a family in the afternoon. There was snow on the ground and our school district was set to start two hours late. Just when I started to worry about how I was going to juggle the day, my husband offered to go in to work three hours late so that he could take Kellen over to my parent's house for the day. We decided that missing school would probably work best for all of us given the short school day anyway.

Off I went to work and got there on time, if not a little early. After my afternoon meeting, it started to snow again. I rushed home and ran into very little traffic. As I drove further south, the snow stopped and the sun came out. My husband left work at almost the very same time, but he needed to drive east to pick up Kellen at my parents. He ran into a big snow storm and major traffic jams. It is 7:15 now and he is still not home. I feel a tiny bit guilty, but mostly I feel very, very grateful to have such a wonderful father for my kids and an incredibly supportive husband for myself. Oh yeah, and tomorrow if the weather is bad, it's my turn to stay home with Kellen.