Before we get started I have a couple of things to address.  First of all, I had the pleasure of attending a Christmas party with my beautiful and charming wife and after the party we had a chance to sneak out for dinner.  She has instituted some ground rules for my blogging moving forward:

1. Do not use her name.  (The reason I used her name is because I didn’t want to refer to her constantly as my wife, like she is some type of chattel, but apparently she is ok with me making her sound like chattel, so she will be called “my wife” from this point forward)
2. Do not use our children’s names.  My  wife is concerned that some internet predator with a terrific taste in internet blogs will use the fact that he knows our children’s names to abduct them.  She didn’t say if I could make up names for them but if I am allowed to they will be henceforth referred to as Thing 1 and Thing 2.  Also, if I’m allowed to do the same thing with my wife she will be henceforth referred to as Shirley.
3. Do not talk about my job (Shirley’s job, not mine).  Not sure why she thought I would ever go to that incredibly boring topic.  When my wife starts talking about her job I have a difficult time even pretending that I am interested, when she brings up work it’s similar to when somebody tells you about something cute their kid did.
4. More stuff about our sex life.  Just kidding, I think that topic may be entirely off limits.
5. No posting of my blog on Shirley’s facebook page.

The second thing that I need to address is that in critiquing my writing style, Shirley indicated that I get a bit long winded and need to focus on making my point and then moving on to my next point.  I could have easily implemented this in the first paragraph but I wanted to throw a couple compliments out to my wife since she has been pretty tolerant of this whole blog thing.  Furthermore, apparently my writing can come off as a bit of a rant.  Ranting is something I am naturally inclined to engage in but will do my best to not be so rantcentric in my writing.  (she also criticized my Kardashean comments in the last blog, claiming that nobody wants to hear about them and they are way too easy of a target, my apologies to any of you who also feel this way).

One of my prior blogs focused on how to make up for your crappy childhood, somehow my mother-in-law was offended by that blog even though she didn’t raise me.  Haven’t heard from the women who actually  raised me, but I’m guessing she’s preoccupied trying to figure out how to put a photo book together on shutter fly and even if she was aware of my blog would have no idea how to find it.  Well, my wife caught me trying to make up for my crappy child hood on Sunday  when I finally pulled the trigger on a slotless race car track.

Like her Facebook account (it’s her fault that I was actually able to post my blog on her Facebook page), she doesn’t log out of her Amazon account so it is perpetually accessible on our laptop at home.  Obviously she is an AmazonPrime member and they have this really clever feature where you just have to click a button and that’s it, it allows you to make the most impulsive of purchases in the easiest way possible.  That being said I went ahead and used her Amazon Prime membership and the one click shopping to make my purchase.  Being a newbie to the Amazon Prime thing along with the one click shopping, I had no idea that she would be alerted to my purchase for Thing 1 and Thing 2.  That night she came in and confronted me about it, and was upset with my one click shopping.  I pouted like Thing 1 and 2 would have pouted if you had told them they couldn’t have the ice cream they had just picked out at the store for dessert that night.

The next morning I was still in full blown sulk mode, primarily because I had promised my brother-in-law Shawn, I don’t think he minds if I use his name but if you do Shawn just let me know, that when he visited from Phoenix (yes he is leaving sunny Phoenix to come to Michigan for the final week of 2015) our kids (us) would be able to play with the slotless race car set I had sent him a link to the previous week.  I’m pretty sure the thought of that racetrack set was the only thing that was going to get him to willingly board the plane to Grand Rapids (he’s flying here with his Wife and his 1 and 4 year old who could be referred to as Thing 3 and 4).  I realized I only had one play if I was going to actually get the race car set, I had to level with my wife and let her know it was for me and Shawn.  Since I hadn’t given her any Christmas ideas she seemed perfectly fine with buying it for me for Christmas.  Now if I can just figure out a way to get her to give me all the other gifts I purchased for my kids it should be a Merry Christmas.