Anniversary Gift

Today is our 20^th wedding anniversary!  We are celebrating this evening by

1) having leftovers for dinner

2) me taking my Son to his piano lesson and then dashing over to parents’ night at one high school and

3) the Common Household Husband going to hear a college rep at the other high school.

Oh, sob, we will be apart!  But on Sunday.... Oh, on Sunday! We are all going out to the most delicious brunch that this town has to offer!  Because we love food!

The traditional gift for the 20^th year of marriage is china.  Well, I did go buy four Corelle dinner-plates, because I left some of our set at my mother-in-law’s.  I think Corelle is a great symbol of our marriage – not fancy, but really unbreakable. Plus plates have to do with food, which seems pretty central to our lives.

In choosing a gift, I decided to go in a different direction.  Here is my anniversary gift to us as a married couple:

Yes, my gift to us is that I vacuumed up the dust underneath our bed.  Because my allergies were driving me crazy, and there was about 20 years of dust under there.  

But wait, there’s more!  All by myself, I also flipped the mattress.  Folks, I do not recommend that you do this by yourself.  It was probably the third stupidest thing I have ever tried to do by myself.  A miracle occurred: I managed to do it without breaking any light fixtures or my back. (In this candid photo, you can see some of the dust that was under the bed.  It was worse than that in some spots.)

My friend, who is a psychiatrist, phoned while I was doing this onerous task.  When I mentioned what I was doing, she talked me through the three “Ps” which prevent most people from de-cluttering:  Passivity, Procrastination, and Perfectionism.  So while I talked to her (procrastination), I lay on the bed (passivity), and looked at my cluttered closet which I knew I could not tackle right then, despite my best intentions (perfectionism).  My friend brilliantly helped me get the three Ps out of the way. She said, “Set a timer for one hour, and after one hour stop cleaning and declare yourself done for the day.”  And that’s what I did.

Happy Flipped Mattress and Under-the-Bed Vacuuming Day, dear Common Household Husband!