He wants me to tell you that he isn’t perfect.  He does.  I’m not just saying that because I can and it’s my blog.

Maybe he isn’t perfect, but he’s the guy who gets up to answer a nightmare-cry from our three-year-old at midnight.  He checks on her when I don’t ask.  He walks from her room to the one next door to cover up our older daughter, kiss her cheek and pull up her quilt over her shoulders.

He might have ADD, but he remembers to bring back coffee for me when he visits Starbucks without me on Sunday mornings.  He knows what I get and sweeps in the door with a skinny vanilla latte in one hand and his keys and wallet in the other.  He puts them all down on the counter and tells me good-morning in the middle of me making a weekend breakfast for the girls. He’s left us to sleep in a little.  But now we’re up, pajamas still warm from bed, and he hugs the three of us in one motion.

Sometimes I tell him he can forgive me for the hugest of transgressions but not the tiniest. I’m really sorry I leave the AC on when I leave the house. And I’m sorry I forgot to close the upstairs window in the 100 degree heat.  I know it faces the hot side of the house (actually every side is the hot side right now).

He really isn’t perfect, but he’s walked with me in the big things:

The lawsuit that almost destroyed us but didn’t.

The births of babies, the nights with newborns who wake the neighbors, the afternoons spent waiting for naptime to come.

The death of one marriage and the rebirth of the same marriage with new energy, new love and new eyes.

And he works a lot.  Not because he wants to but because he has to.  The difference between him and some men is that he actually wants to come home at the end of the day.  I don’t take that for granted.  I am blessed because, even when he does come home and explodes his gear and papers all over my clean table, he is home.  And he loves being here.   Even in the chaos and the kids with grimy hands and faces, with unfolded laundry and an occasional three-year-old tantrum during dinner.  He still wants to be here.

He isn’t perfect.  Not at all.

Even then he wasn’t.

[But then neither was I.  I never have been.]

But he loves us.  And he belongs to us.

He’s as perfect as he needs to be.

He’s writing today about confession and changed lives over on his blog.  Go visit him and tell him “hi” for me, and then tell him HAPPY BIRTHDAY because he’s 35 today.

[You can also follow him on twitter and you can follow me on twitter too if you haven't already.]