As I may have mentioned once or twice, today is my 15th wedding anniversary. I don’t write much about my husband. It’s kind of like an unwritten blogging rule that we’ll yak about our kids all day long but tiptoe around our significant others. I try to respect his privacy and probably won’t ever write about him. Except today. The one day a year that instead of focusing on what’s wrong with him, I remember all the things that make him right for me:

1. Family always comes first. Before anyone or anything else, me & our son are the most important things in his life - top of the list - family means everything to him.
2. He’s an excellent provider. Yes, he’s a workaholic. There are worse things. Like a husband who refuses to get off his ass and take care of his family.
3. He has a brilliant business mind. It’s hard for me to explain, given that his business acumen far (FAR) exceeds mine. Remember that scene in Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon’s eating lunch outside with Minnie Driver and he’s trying to explain how it is that he can do organic chemistry for fun? And he says that it’s like when Beethoven and Mozart looked at a piano, “I just play.” That’s how business is for Big Daddy. He never took the first business class. Like a musical prodigy, he just plays.
4. He has great style and taste. Big Daddy has picked out every formal dress I’ve purchased since I’ve known him. (And I used to buy them often, when my job had me doing gala events all the time.) And one of them - this gold, haltertop, full-skirted dress? $5 off the clearance rack. I KNOW!! He has the ability to see something on a hanger that makes me think “Ugh.” and say, “Just try it on,” and I put it on and it looks like a million bucks.
5. He taught me to buy good shoes. When I met Big Daddy, I used to buy cheap shoes. I figured that, by paying less, I could buy more. He took me to Goldsmiths and introduced me to Nine West and Enzo. Which he probably regrets, since now all I want is Loubous and Manolos. Heh.
6. He taught me to vacation. And introduced me to the gorgeous beach that is Destin. Even when we were struggling students he insisted on going to the beach for a week every year. (We won’t get into the tragic motels that we inhabited in those years. Yikes!) And after Elijah came along, he insisted that we vacation occasionally without him. It’s a good practice that I highly recommend for new parents. And one that he probably will also live to regret when I start whining for a beach house someday. Heh heh.
7. He despises the University of Tennessee. And you just can’t put a high enough price on good taste.
8. He’s a cut-throat Scrabble player. Which I don’t necessarily like that much, since of course I’m always playing against him. But I do respect when he spells a 10-letter word with a ‘Z” on the triple-word-score square. I think in all the games in all the years I’ve only ever beaten him once at Scrabble. Which is why I prefer Trivial Pursuit.
9. He adheres to the policy to never do anything for yourself that you can pay someone else to do for you. See? Soul. Mates.
10. He put up with me during the rough patches. Even though I wasn’t a very good wife or mother there for a while, he never gave up on me. Patience is definitely not one of his virtues, yet he did abide much more than I probably would have had the circumstances been reversed. Which really takes us back to Number 1: Family always comes first, doesn’t it?