The Sunday before Christmas is a good time – being the end of the last get-things-done weekend and the day before an eight-hour-workweek – to say

THANK YOU, SHANNON!!!

for taking care of nearly every last detail of our Christmas: making bakery-scale quantities of gourmet-level treats like cookies and fudge; making, buying, and wrapping presents for everyone in our immediate and extended families (except herself, of course); doing the ridiculous amount of planning and packing needed for our trip to the grandparents for the holiday itself; handling pretty much every aspect of our holiday-card arrangements (choosing them, ordering them, addressing them); decorating the tree and the house; doing a hundred different activities with the girls to sweep them up in the spirit of the season; et cetera, et cetera.* All this, while also taking care of all the usual stuff: cooking, cleaning, shopping, chauffeuring, keeping herself and the girls healthy and happy and adorable.

Doing my own 1.5 full-time jobs is not easy, exactly, but it’s a lot easier to handle when someone as skilled, hard-working, wonderful, and beautiful as my wife is taking care of the other 1.5 full-time jobs that go into making our household run. I appreciate everything she does for all of us!

(My own, comparatively pathetic holiday-related task list: setting up the tree; packing and unpacking the car for the travels; mailing all the cards and packages; getting a gift for Shannon; finding a cat-sitter. This list looks even more anemic now that it’s written down.)