It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood!

As some of you probably know, I am more of a morning person than Jen. Every now and then she'll ask me "How can you be so god damn cheery every god damn morning?" The pictures below are all of the explanation I need. It boils down to this: Every day when I go to sleep, I can look back on the day and, regardless of my shortcomings in other areas [insert penis joke here...I know you did], I can honestly say that, with regard to the fam, that day was the best day of my life. Every day. It's like Groundhog Day, but I don't have to fix anything.

Now, I can't say that everyone else in the family feels the same. There are some days when Jen might go to bed thinking that day was one of the worst of her life. This usually means I forgot to pick up a sock in the living room or that I didn't pick up her dishes from the family room. But even Jennifer, who never got out of bed before 11am when we dated in high school, is susceptible to spontaneous "cheering up" by the kids when they wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 7:30.

Because this is supposed to be a blog about our daily lives, I'll provide an example from today that explains why I can wake up happy every morning. This morning, Jen got home from her first 12 hour night shift at 7:30am. The kids had been awake for about 30 minutes (much to my chagrin). Jen didn't walk in and go to bed; instead she got breakfast ready for the kids and got Kyan ready for school so that I could dick around for longer in the shower and quickly press my collar (because Jen says I look like a tool when it's wrinkly). This followed the 30 minutes of Kyan playing with Nolan in the bed (yes, tsk, tsk, both were sleeping with me by this morning) that I awoke to. Even though I didn't get much sleep, it's hard not to smile when I wake up to both sets of dimples smiling at me. I digress. So we (Kyan, Pie & I) leave to bring Kyan to school. There is a spontaneous rendition of whatever song contains the "Ba-rum-pa-pum-pum...," followed by a slight motion-sickness scare from Kyan as we pass the football stadium. I drop him off at school, realizing that I forgot his book bag and his slippers (his teacher would point out that I forgot his snow pants when I picked him up). Pie and I went to the mall, where I realized that I'm not a very efficient shopper. Before we left, Pie and I played in the front seat of the van for about 20 minutes after I unsuccesfully tried to get him to eat. He sucked on my nose. We picked Kyan up. After missing our exit while talking to Alltel, we made it home at about 1:00pm. Here Jen stepped up again. I was tired, so Jen woke up (note that she had to work tonight at 7pm) and took Nolan so that I could nap for a little while. <--Lucky for you, Honey, I picked a favorable day for you to post my first "log". -- I'll fast-forward through dinner because this is already really long (and by now Jen is probably the only one still reading). I put Nolan to sleep - pretty easy night - then sat down to read to Kyan. We read 3 books, then Kyan asked if I still had a headache. I said I did. He told me to sit up and lean forward on two pillows (which he handed me) and informed me that he was going to give me a massage. It consisted of him rubbing my shirt and my hair for about 10 minutes while we were both totally silent...and it got rid of my headache (after tylenol and Jen's massage failed). More importantly, seeing the look in his eyes when I told him that his massage had fixed my headache cemented in my mind that today was the best day of my life.

Gotta go...cat's scraping on Nolan's door...Friday he gets a bath Honey!