I work full time and do most of the cleaning, cooking, and kid stuff. My wife is handicapped and several months into recovering from a major surgery that didn’t go well, and she’s only recently starting to pick up the slack again. I’m exhausted. I feel like our home is wasted because it’s never clean enough to enjoy it. I use what energy I have on the important things like making sure my kids have healthy meals, but that means letting other things fall by the wayside, like basic repairs and mopping.

But I’m happy. I love my family. I love spending time with them. Every once in a while I can just sit back and be grateful for all the things that have gone right in my life.

And at least once a week my kids do something genuinely hilarious.

Lately my two-year-old son has been doing this baby talk thing, copying his sister who was copying from a video she saw of herself as a baby. So we’ve been gently reminding him that we don’t do baby talk in our house. No baby talk.

The other day, I heard my wife singing Baby, baby, baby… in a way that was unmistakably Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me”, except then she’d suddenly transition into Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears”. I heard her do this three separate times throughout the day. Then she did it in the car and I pointed out that she was definitely doing the wrong baby, baby, baby.

She disagreed. Phones came out. Songs were played.

“See? It goes Baby, BAby,”

“No it’s Baby, baby, baby…”

“No, that’s too flat. You’re doing Baby, baby, baby, but it’s Baby, BAby-”

Then my son interrupts from the back seat: “Stop it! No baby talk!”