What Thoreau Didn't Know...

This week is about my awesome and wonderful husband.

The mister has not always had a lot of self confidence when it comes to his academic abilities. Once upon a time, he was misdiagnosed with a learning disability. It was, in fact, a problem with his sight, but it left him seriously doubting himself in the academic world. Add to that some pretty crummy teachers (seriously...I have actually gasped at some of his stories) and the charms of a southern education and you have a recipe for disaster. Honestly, I think this self-doubt is one of the reasons why the Mister is starting his "official" college career a little later in life than most. It just took him a little longer to realize that he has what it takes and to be sure enough to give it everything he's got.

With two kids and my new job and (trying!) to manage a house, I don't have the time to sit with him and see what he's up to all the time like I wish I could. We definitely talk about what he's working on and how his classes are going, but I don't really have the ability to get into what he is learning. He had been worried about a test he had coming up--his first "real" test--in an English class. If you know him, you know that spelling and grammar are definitely NOT the man's strong points. Lucky for him, he married an English major. I was hoping to spend some time with him studying and helping him prepare for his test, but with two kids refusing to sleep and the million other things that get in the way, it just didn't happen. He was on his own. He studied hard, just as he has been doing since the start of the semester, but when he took his test, he came home and said he felt like he didn't do very well. We were both bummed, but kept our chins up and said there would be lots more tests to do better on and balance out the grade.

Yesterday, he came home with the test. And now...it lives here:

That's right. On our fridge, where all good grades go!

In case you can't see the grade (or in case you also want to sample the poor sweet man's spelling skills...)

And, just because I think it is positively awesome, a little glimpse at what he sat at the table doing in preparation for a test in a DIFFERENT English class (poor man! Two at once!) I actually had to rescue this from the trash to take the picture. Sis got hold of it and added her personal touch, and the Mister crumpled it, as though to destroy the evidence. Luckily, I'm sneaky. (If you can't quite tell, it is the names of the major characters in his novel he had to read this week, written over and over and over and over.)

I am so blessed to be married to a good, GOOD man who is working hard to make our lives better.