Honey, thanks.

I’ve been meaning to say this to you a time or two or ten over the past . . . oh, I don’t know . . . five years since we started having and raising kids, but sometimes I just forget. (I’m kind of tired these days.)

Thanks for eating that bag of frozen rice I heated up the other day and called dinner. And then thanks for laughing with me about it.

Thanks for getting up with me in the middle of the night when our son was born and delivering graham crackers to me as I nursed him and cried, head heavy with exhaustion and the worries new motherhood brought.

Thanks for running me a bath while I put the kids to bed. (The water is sometimes too hot but we can work on that.)

Thanks for breaking my icy exhaustion-fueled fits of silence with jokes so silly that I have no choice but to laugh—for making me see that yes, laughter is indeed the best medicine.

Thanks for answering the same questions I pose to you on an endless loop—which include, but are not limited to, the following popular categories: What Sounds Good for Dinner, Can You Fix my iPhone and What Is the Name of That Star Wars Character Again?

Thanks for being the Chief Keeper and Mover of the Elf during Christmas season. You may not be there to see it for yourself when they wake up, but man, they love when Ruby is dangling from the chandelier.

Thanks for emptying the dishwasher at 5 a.m. (Gosh, thank you SO much for this.)

Thanks for your work you do at your actual job, and the other work you do every day to keep our life in order. Then thanks for doing all that and coming home and still wrestling with the kids on the floor.

Thanks for letting me put my career on hold so I can pause with our beautiful children and bask a little more in these sweet early days of our children’s lives.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there and just say it again: thanks.

I don’t say it often because man, these days are crazy, but I swear it’s always there in the back of my mind and the middle of my heart.

Our life isn’t perfect, and it will never be. But I believe those miles we’ve traveled—some a joy, others a slog—have made us who we are as people, as a couple, and as a family. And I’ll tell you what—there’s nothing I love more than what we’ve built.

So let’s hang out on the couch tonight and dream a little more about that house we’ll build one day in Montana, or that trip to Italy we always say we’ll take. Or heck, let’s keep things real and daydream instead about that killer trip we’ll take to Target on Friday night. Now that is something guaranteed and somehow a little sweeter than all that other stuff.

Thanks, honey. I haven’t said it much, but I mean it.