Added
I forgot to extend this invitation: If you’re married or in a relationship, and you’d like to join in, please do. Leave your happy thoughts about your S/O in the comments, or write them up at your blog — but please leave a link here, too.

Day 1

Thought: I am genuinely fond of my partner.
Task: List one characteristic you find endearing or lovable.

This is easy. I *am* genuinely fond of my husband. Do I only get to list one characteristic?

Mike has a wacky, irreverent sense of humor, and he applies it to our marriage, parenting…pretty much any place where we might otherwise be at risk of taking ourselves too seriously. In the parenting area, this is especially fun — I’ve had this sort of attitude all along, but the only place I’ve had to talk about it was in my daughter’s blog (which is woefully out of date, and I’m considering switching to something that is a family site instead). While it was fun to write about my own offbeat approach to parenting and to get comments from strangers and online friends, it’s sooooo much better to share parenting with someone who *gets* me.

The other morning, we had a disagreement — maybe not even a disagreement, but just a discussion left unfinished — about discipline. I found myself hemming and hawwing (are those words?) about my perceived disconnect for a while. Later, as I thought more rationally about our approach to discipline, I had a forehead-slapping DUH moment in which I realized that I was really splitting hairs. While we might not have been on exactly the same measure of music, we were on the same page, singing the same song. What was I nit-picking about? We have a blast becoming Maya’s parents together (even though I’m finding it difficult to loosen the control I’ve been used to exclusively holding), and it’s going to be exciting again when we have a child together someday.

Having someone who “gets” me so well is quite a rush.