#36 He Lets Me Be Helpless

It all started with this painting:

I've been in love with this picture for years now. Every time my husband and I would walk into a store that had it, I would stop in front of it and sigh.

Now it's hanging in my dining room and I sigh about ten times a day. Music starts softly playing behind me as I day dream about being the woman in the photo. The dancing one...not the one holding the umbrella.

I received this as a surprise last Christmas present. My husband and I walked into our house close to midnight on Christmas Eve after having just spent the last hour practicing our MJ dance moves on my brother's new XBox Kinect and there it was at the bottom of the staircase.

I guess I need to clarify a few things:

1. My family has forever and always opened up our presents on Christmas Eve night.
2. My husband and I opened up our gifts to each other like anxious little school children on Christmas Eve's Eve. I'm thinking it's a tradition that is going to take....

Anywho, it was a honkin' huge gift to be greeted with and of course I needed it to be immediately hung.

But I patiently waited the two weeks time that my husband needed before hopping right to it (see #29 He Hates a Nagging Wife).

Then, as an added bonus, without any mention at all, he hung this for me:

Yes, I am one of 'those' women. I gather other peoples old used things so that I can put them in my house and call them words like, 'vintage' and 'antique'. This one though is special. My lil bro bought it special for me for Christmas and I like it just fine. (It beats the rusted sewing machine I had sitting there last year.)

And here's why I'm so lucky. See that frame that's above the phone? Well, it was on the other side of the room originally and I replaced it with a picture that my brother's girlfriend painted for me. The problem is, I haven't hung a gosh darn thing in my house ever. My idea of 'hanging' a picture on the wall is to either stare desperately at the wall in hopes that a nail is already there or to grab a push pin, jam it into the wall, and call it a day. Do I know that this isn't the proper way to hang things? Yes, sadly I do. Do I also know that a supposedly educated person like myself should be able to do something as simple as properly knock a few nails into a wall? Yes.

But darn it, there are just certain things that I want to be helpless about. This also includes changing the light bulbs that are super high in the kitchen. Can I do it? With proper balance, sure. But if hubby is home, well, he's my knight in shining armor if he does it.

Fortunately for me, he lets me be this way. Without complaint.

So, thus came the point where I had to pull that frame out from where I'd shamefully hid it until my wall either grew a nail on it's own or hubby was hanging other things, as we've established he was, and shyly say, "Well, if you're hanging all that, could you maybe hang this one too?".

And he did, of course.