I neglected to mention my very best friend a couple weeks ago when I was recounting the ways I've been buoyed up. I don't talk about my Husband on my blog very often, except to include him in the cast of characters. This is because my marriage falls into the category of 'None of yer damn business!'

Plus, it would seem like I was bragging on him all the time. He's the guy who mops the kitchen weekly, bakes custard pies, folds laundry, washes diapers, and completely takes over bedtime so I can practice.

If I say, "I want to take a sushi class." He says, "I will go with you." If I say, I need you to read something and keep an open mind. He takes the hour to read it and then spends the next three discussing it and trying to understand my perspective even if there's a game on. If I say, "Honey, I found my cable spools!" He will rent a trailer and spend a weekend chasing them down. If at ten-thirty at night I mention that I'm craving junk food and want some Flaming Hot Cheetos, he will climb out of bed, get his shoes, and offer to drive the twenty minutes to get me some. It wasn't even a pregnant craving either. I declined and he brought me a bowl of ice cream instead. My favorite though might be when I called him up at work and ask if he could spend his lunch hour at Home Goods picking up the rug I'd fallen in love with the night before. All he had to go on was my description and an attempt to describe it's location in the store. He was successful.

Don't get me wrong, we are still growing. There are times we grate on each other's nerves. Sometimes we completely miss the mark in communicating. This summer we will be married for ten years, and he really is my best friend. I am kind of proud that I don't have a single girl friend, family member, or other person on the planet who knows me better or more about me than he does.

I was really young when we got married. I'm still relatively young, but we were really young and dumb then. I'm not sure if I got lucky, or we have managed to bring out the best in each other. During a play date a friend and I were talking about choosing to be home and raising kids. She found out just how young I was, and asked if that didn't scare me for my daughters. That maybe I would want them to wait and be older. I responded with something like, "I want my daughters to feel that they have choices and to not make choices out of fear." While that is still true, what I should have said is, "I will be grateful if my girls choose someone like their Papa whether they be 17, 27, 47, or 74."

Oh, and he totally has good taste in women and in rugs, but I'm taking credit for how well the cable spools turned out.

Our family room is the other room I've been working on. It feels like my whole house has been in upheaval since Christmas because... it has. I am the decorating equivalent of  "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie..."and it all started with this rug.

We finished a makeover on this same room a while back, but that was over a year ago and before we decided that all of the toys were going to stay here and that we wouldn't have a playroom. You already know that most everything came either off Craigslist or Goodwill...the couch, table, lamps, globes, one of the dollhouses. The cable spools were free from behind a warehouse. I made the curtains out of the brown ones that used to be in Porkchop's room and some cheapo white ones. I sewed some of the pillows. Is it bad that I painted an Chinese antique table? He probably would not have sold it to me if he know I was going to take some chalk paint to it, but now it might be one of my favorite pieces of furniture.