Wife.Mom.Cynic. is thankful for...Women's work.

This is a picture of my husband, brothers and my baby not giving a rat's ass that I was cleaning up the kitchen by myself. Aren't they adorable?

Today I cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner for Sweetness, Zach and my two brothers. I guess it wasn't quite a full Thanksgiving meal, we didn’t have turkey. I opted for honey glazed ham and a stuffed chicken from Central Market. Good enough.

I did, however, work very hard on this meal. I wanted it to be really yummy so I got up at 7 a.m. to get the ball rolling; we were ready to eat at 1:30 p.m., exactly when I said we’d eat.

So I cooked and they ate and it was great. They watched football and ate more, creating all manner of mess in the kitchen.

It took me an hour to clean it up. I was in there scraping plates, scrubbing baked on macaroni and cheese off the sides of a dish, wiping down cabinets, transferring leftovers into Tupperware, covering up pies with foil, etc.

When I re-joined the crew in the living room, I had a question:

“Guys. I’m not mad. The work is already done. But I’d like to know something. Did it occur to any one of you for one iota of second that I might need or like some help in that kitchen? Huh? I’m genuinely curious. How did three grown men and a baby, who ate heartily, pulling plate after plate, and fork after fork out of the cabinets, make peace within themselves to sit there burping and watching football, and not even so much as ask if I’d like a little assistance?”

They all looked desperately confused and offered the following sincere responses:

Brother #1: "I thought about it when you went in there and were making a lot of noise."

Sweetness: "I just figured it was teamwork since I went to the grocery store yesterday. You like to clean, don’t you?"

Brother #2: "I thought about it when you first started, but you just seemed to kind of tackle it."

He had the nerve to use a football term.

*sigh*

Anyway, the original point of this post was to tell you what I'm thankful for this year. Here it is:

I’m thankful for my boss who earlier this year agreed to a flex schedule which allows me to work from home. As a result, I’m quite a bit more sane than I was at this time last year. I’m thankful for Zach and Sweetness, friends and family. I’m thankful to Bravo for this season of Real Housewives of Atlanta. And most importantly, I’m thankful for cosmetic dentistry and my dear Dr. Margolis! 2009 was pretty awesome.