Clay

I've been trying to compose a post about him in my head for a few weeks, it being our anniversary recently and all. But I just can't seem to fit all my thoughts together in a nice flowing way. So maybe I'll let Clay speak for himself, or let his actions speak for themselves by giving a sort of "day in the life" type of thing.

Clay is an early bird. Many mornings he wakes up at 4:00 to exercise on the eliptical. Crazy to wake up that early, but he doesn't want exercising to interfere with his family time after work. Luke's been waking up super early lately, so Clay takes care of him until 6:00, gets him breakfast, and then catches the train to work.

Clay loves work. He always has. I have NEVER heard him complain that he doesn't want to go to work. Instead when I ask him about his workday he says things like, "Yeah, I got a new project today that's pretty interesting"...or "I went to this really cool meeting today where they talked about..." or "yeah, this new assignment should be fun." He calls me at lunch time to check up on me. About every couple of weeks during his lunch break, he'll walk over to the public library(which has a much larger selection of children's books than the one here) and walk back to work with a backpack stuffed to capacity with books for Cole and Luke. And if there is ever any treat of any kind at work, he saves his share and brings it home to me.

On his way home from work, he listens to general conference on his MP3 player. Once he's home, we all quickly have dinner and then move on to the evening routine. Clay takes Luke, because he is more challenging, and lets me work with Cole, which is a breeze. From 6:30 to 8:00 he switches stimulating activities with Luke every 5 minutes or so. They study a little, play, study, sing, study, play again, etc.

Then the boys are in bed and he packs his lunch and sets out his clothes for the next day (which, by the way, he has a very sophisticated system of knowing which combination of dress shirt, pants and tie to wear each day of the week).

On his days off, the kids wake up bright and early and he gets up and says to me, "What time do you want me to wake you up, Love?" I'll sleep for another hour or so, but if I told him to wake me up at noon, he would totally go along with it. I do try to keep things fair though, so when he has some free time to himself to do whatever he wants, he works on learning projects for the kids. He loves to make charts for them, print off pictures, find cool web sites for them, compile learning materials, etc. His project this Saturday was making Spanish labels for the kids to put on different things in the house.

Every weekend since school has ended, he comes up with some fun, new outing to do as a family. He's just...crazy about us! We are his hobby, his interest, his fun. That pretty much sums it all up.

I love him more than anything! He is my absolute best friend in the world!