Mike is my husband. He is 41 years old. I met him almost 19 years ago at a heavy metal concert. I was there with my friend and he was there with some of his friends. My friend liked one of his friends so we started hanging out together. I didn't really like him at first, but soon realized he was a very good guy and started to like him. When I met him he had very long hair and was the lead singer in a heavy metal band. He wasn't very good. We would go hang out with his band and watch them practice and play at bars. We were usually drunk. Oh, yeah, and he had longer hair than I did, and mine was long. After about three months he moved into my apartment with me, and we have been together ever since. About two and a half years later we bought our house. About two and a half years after that we got married, on September 11, 1993. In 1997 we decided to start our family and I got pregnant the very first month we tried. At five weeks along I had a miscarriage. It then took about 15 months before I was able to get pregnant again. We were starting to get worried that it wouldn't happen, but finally it did and we started our family in 1999.
Mike is a very good dad. From the beginning he has always fed them, changed diapers and took very good care of them. I know with the first two when they were babies if they cried in the middle of the night he would pretend he didn't hear them and so I would always have to get up with them, but he is paying for that now because if anyone cries during the night now he has to get up with them because I am so tired I don't even hear them. He likes to play video games with them. He likes to play outside with them and take them on walks with the dog. He likes to take them swimming. He plays games with them and reads to them. I really can't think of anything that he doesn't do that I wish he did. He makes breakfast for them every morning and makes Carson's lunch for school every day. He gives them baths, gets them ready for bed and reads them bedtime stories. Sometimes he comes home from work to me saying, "They're all yours. I can't take them anymore today." On those rare days when they have driven me nuts all day long, he is very good to take care of them, play with them and make dinner while I go veg out in my bedroom for the evening.
Mike is a locksmith. He works with his dad and his brother. His dad owns the business and someday, maybe, Mike will own it. He likes what he does, but he gets tired of being around his brother because he is a total jerk. One thing he doesn't like about being a locksmith is that anyone who knows him will call him if they have a problem or if they or someone they know has locked their keys in their car. For some reason people feel like he should be obligated to drop whatever he is doing and come and do jobs for free for them, which he usually does. If it is a good friend then he doesn't feel too bad about going to help them, but when it is just an acquaintance he's not too happy about it. That is one reason our phone is listed under my maiden name, which acquaintances of his would have no idea what it is. The other is that's how it was listed before we got married and we never wanted to pay $35 just to have the name changed. Just this weekend one of our neighbors caught Mike when he was out playing with the kids and wanted Mike to make some keys for him, twice. Saturday Mike made the keys for him, but afterward felt a little bad because he felt he'd been too rude to the guy. I guess he wasn't rude enough because Sunday the guy wanted more keys, for free. How rude.
Mike loves the New Orleans Saints NFL team. He has loved them for years, so it bothered him when the Saints were doing really good last season and someone would see him wearing a Saints shirt or hat and say, "Yeah, I like the Saints this year, too," making it seem like Mike just jumped on the bandwagon because they are finally doing good after all these years. Maybe someday we'll actually get to go to a Saints game. That would be his dream come true.
Mike loves to golf. He used to golf a lot more before we had kids. Now he golfs every Thursday night in a men's league. Usually on his lunch hour he runs to a nearby golf course and hits a bucket of balls and then goes and picks Carson up from school.
Mike makes beer. He is very good at it, too. He is in a beer club. When I first heard about it I thought, "Oh, that's great, a club just to sit around and drink beer. How stupid." It's not like that at all. Everyone makes a certain style of beer, then they taste each beer in very small glasses and judge each one. At the end of the evening they add up all the scores and whoever won gets to send their beer to the national competition for the month. Everyone also brings really good food to eat, too. I used to go to the meetings just for the food, but that was before I had kids. He used to make at least one batch of beer a month and he used to win or place in a lot of beer competitions. His beer making is another casualty of having kids. Now he only makes about two batches of beer a year and doesn't enter very many in the competitions. It used to just about kill him if he had to miss a beer club meeting, but now he only goes to a few a year.
He is a really great guy. He will do anything for me. For instance, one day I was so sick that I couldn't get up off the floor, yes, the floor. The only time I could get up was when I had to puke. I think it was the sickest I've ever been. Finally about half-way through the day the kids got tired of me ignoring them and I couldn't even get up to make them lunch, so I had them call Mike at work and tell him that he needed to come home. He was busy at work and couldn't just leave for the day, so he came home and got the kids and took them to work with him. Luckily his job is such that he can leave and come home or go pick up kids or take them to work if we need him too. Luckily Grandpa likes to see the kids so it doesn't bother him too much to have the kids there disrupting their work. He will go to the store in the middle of the night if one of the kids is sick and we don't have medicine. He will even go to the store just to buy me tampons and pads, although he will buy beer at the same time. He says he doesn't want to look too uncool buying only tampons and pads. He has to throw some beer in there, too. Anyway, I don't know what I'd do without him. He is a great guy and a great dad. I know I need to be a better wife and learn to appreciate how good he really is.
I just realized after writing about me and Mike that I used the phrase "before we had kids" quite a few times. I don't want anyone to think that because things have changed and we don't get to do some of the stuff we do as much as before we had kids that we would change a thing. We would give up all of our hobbies for our kids, we're just glad that we don't have to. I think people need to have their own things to do and not just give everything up when they have kids. You can't lose your identity when you have your kids. Your kids need to see the real you and know that you have a life outside of them, too. People who give up everything for their kids are the ones that can't take it when their kids grow up and move out because their whole life just left. Obviously, if there were some kind of situation where your child needs you to give up everything, such as health or mental problems, you would, but even then you need to keep something for yourself or you'll become depressed or go nuts. What I'm rambling on trying to say is that once you have kids most of your energy goes to them, but you need to spend some of your energy on yourself to keep yourself, because if you lose yourself, you're not doing your kids any favors.
