It’s 8:43PM.  The kids are catching onto the well lit world around them that lasts well into the 7th and even the 8th hour of the evening.  Its getting harder to get an 8 o clock bedtime to happen as the summer months quickly approach.  Once we finally get all 5 locked and loaded, Chris sets up a study station at the kitchen table.  I come down for my nightly (NOT EVERY NIGHT!!) bowl of ice cream and I see him there.  WOMP WOMP WOMP.  No House Of Cards for us.  It’s nearing the end of the semester and he is busting his hump to keep his 4.0 to place favorably for clinicals as his nursing school endeavor continues.  Sometimes I just wonder at him.  He forces me to ask myself if I could ever do it.  Could I go back to school to make a better life for us…could I do years and years of hard work to change our life forever?  If you are lucky enough to be with a partner who prompts you to ask yourself hard questions…just because of who they are…then you know what a bitch it can be.  Lets say you just want to curl up in bed and be your usual lazy slob self with your bowl of ice cream, but they say to you…”Hey, I gotta do at least two hours here…you wanna sit here with me?  Maybe you could write while I do this?”  Awe F@#$.  I guess I’ll pound his bowl of ice cream and harness the energy from the sugar while The Strokes blast in my ear buds and I’ll write about absolutely nothing…nothing that is our life…nothing that is our sacred essence…nothing that is the complete perfect beauty of what we have been creating together since we were 15 years old.  I won’t mention that we listed our house for sale last week and then this week after realizing how stressful it would be to be parenting 5 kids and doing college and running a drywall business and potentially selling a house…we immediately unlisted it.  I won’t mention that we are both as fickle as the weather and the only thing that we have ever been truly sure of is our love for one another.  I won’t mention that at least once a week for the past 3 weeks he has called me in the middle of his work day and asked me to tell him that everything will be “OK”.  I won’t let on that it was hard for me to tell him that everything WILL be “OK”.  We both know it will be fine, good, great, OK.  It doesn’t always feel that way.  It doesn’t feel like we’ll ever get out of this city, where our kids are growing up in a parking lot and occasionally scratching cars with their bike handles.  It doesn’t feel like we’ll ever get the break we are wishing would come.  It feels like we’ll be in our starter home forever…but I’m here to tell ME something.  And that something is SHUT UP.  SHUT UP YOU SELFISH, SMALL MINDED DUMBY.  You have more than most people and your tiny home is regularly filled with not only the 6 people you love most, but lots of others too!  Aside from an obvious gluten allergy and maybe a lazy eye, we are all healthy and prospering.  WE ARE THE AMERICAN DREAM!  We have a future and a hope and lots to look forward to, and we are doing the hard work to ensure that eventually it will happen.  Here I sit, keeping the company of the man who has more energy and drive and ambition and heart than I do…and it is a privilege.  Aside from filling a crock pot and doing the laundry and lactating when its needed, I don’t feel I bring a lot to the table, but thankfully Chris doesn’t seem to be keeping track.  But if he needs me to, I’ll eat another bowl of ice cream and use that energy to write another long winded paragraph, documenting the mishmash of our everyday.  Mr. Krouse, you are my king.