Balance

Each and every day, I am grateful to be raising my son with my husband. We make a good team in a lot of ways, and I feel so blessed when I consider not only that I'm not doing this alone but that I am raising a child with a truly involved father.

Kay. So, that's the sweet stuff.

Now, here's why I am so grateful to my husband. I know, I know. I should have posted this for Father's Day. All I can say is, see item one.

1. We are patient in different ways.

I can sit and listen to my son talk for hours on end. He jabbers on about dinosaurs, balls, tractors, crayons. He tells me to sit in a chair, "Stay here, Mommy. Chair."  I walk and run with him in his stroller, chatting with him about what he sees.  In the middle of the night, I can soothe him back to sleep, singing, rocking, whatever he needs, while my husband insists, "Ari will never sleep again." He's not patient at one in the morning.

When Ari eats dinner, though, I cannot just sit there for forty minutes insisting that the beans need to be eaten. I have stuff to do and sitting by while my toddler says, "No!" in the face of what we offer is not on my list.  So, I get up and go do all the things while my husband talks to our son about one more bite, calmly telling him that no, hummus is not on the menu tonight (seriously, little guy, why are you so obsessed with hummus?!).  He will wait out the crying. Wait out the insistence that it is, in fact, time to go play with the tractor.  And our son will eat.  Actual food.

2. We play differently

Our son needs to know that playing can consist both of sitting quietly, making the horsey and the piggy talk to each other and of running away from the tickle monster.  I will run with our son, but my husband is better at the swinging the kid up into the sky making him giggle furiously stuff.  My heart sings when I get to watch them play, safely, from the floor, next to the piggy and the horsey.

3. We worry about different things

So, in short, we have a balanced menu of things to worry about. I can worry about the stairs in the garage, the rock wall in the living room, and blankets and pillows, and he can worry about sugar intake and television. We worry together about quality schools to round out the whole worry balance.

Plus, this...