My husband and I are a team. A detective team. We’re not licensed investigators or anything, but we have some skills. Within just one 24-hour period, we were faced with the following cases:

Who dumped our laundry out of the dryer?

Who was cooking and didn’t clean up their mess?

 Why is GrubHub at the door?

What is this thing in the middle of the kitchen table?       

You probably guessed, without even knowing them, that the culprit in each case was one of our children. And, spoiler alert, the motive in three out of the four cases was “I was in a hurry.” The thing on the kitchen table did take some real follow-up work, though.

Why do we do this detective work? For the sake of our sanity.

See, there was a time when one or the other of us knew everything that was going on in our house. In fact, WE actually controlled what went on in our house. But somewhere along the way we lost that. It was probably about the time the youngest one got his driver’s license.

So now we’re just playing catch-up – figuring out after the fact what happened. Trying to keep each other on the same page. And we’ve developed other team skills in order to survive a household where we’re outnumbered by mostly-grown offspring. We track food trends:

Why did we buy bananas? No one eats them anymore. And we’re out of potato chips.

We track Amazon purchases:

Who charged $35.00 on our account? You can use our Prime account, but YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THE ORDER YOURSELF!

And we’ve perfected the ability to run children out of the room by turning the television to something WE want to watch. Okay, that’s not entirely true – MY favorite show is what really chases them off, but I’m pretty sure my husband thinks it’s worth it.

Basically, our team is on the defense. It’s us against them; with our minds, our sanity, and our very will to live at stake. We are not going to let them beat us. We repeat that to ourselves often, through clenched teeth and with wild eyes.

They are not takin’ us down, babe. We won’t let ‘em get us! Stay alive…I will find you!

We make a good team. I am truly blessed.

 And that’s really all I’m trying to say. Sometimes it’s easy to forget in the busyness of life. But if you have a good teammate by your side, then you are also truly blessed.

If you have a teammate who will come to you three days later and report that “that thing in the middle of the kitchen table” was part of a receiver that middle child purchased during a thrift store spree and was planning to repair – because your teammate knows that you still consider it an open investigation and won’t be happy until it’s closed – you are blessed.

If you have a teammate who will keep an eye on the food trends – peanut butter is on the rise, yogurt is down this week – you are blessed.

If you have a teammate who will clean the guinea pig cage and then have the little furry things “talk” to you – where are my veggies, woman! – you are blessed.

If you have a teammate who will celebrate the small parenting victories with you and sympathize with you over the defeats – you are blessed.

If you have a teammate who will call your family to see what they need when you’re going to Costco – you are blessed.

If you have a teammate who laughs with you – you are blessed.

If you have a teammate like I do – then you are blessed.

I’m glad we’re in this together, teammate.