He does, she does: why two heads are better than one.

There are moments in life when you realize just how lucky you are to have a partner.

The other day I went grocery shopping and bought a new spray bottle of kitchen cleaner. We still had a couple ounces left in the old bottle, but it was doing that thing where the long straw inside the bottle doesn’t poke into the remaining dregs of fluid. Excited to have a fresh full bottle, I abandoned the near-empty one and began spritzing away with the new…only to discover that the spritzer on the new one was malfunctioning. Brian came into the kitchen and was commiserating on the sadness of it, when suddenly a lightbulb lit up in my head.

“Wait!” said I, “I know what to do!” I began unscrewing the top off the bottles, first the old one, then the new one. Then I eagerly lifted the full bottle and began to pour it into the old one.

“Um, honey,” Brian said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to put the cleaner in the old bottle so we can spray it!”

“Wait a minute,” he said, “Let me try something.” Gently, Brian took the bottles away from me, put them on the counter…and simply switched the heads.

One of my new roles in life, as Brian's partner, seems to be providing comic relief.

Later that same week, Brian and I were standing in the bathroom around ten o’clock at night, prepping to brush our teeth together. We have a toothbrushing dance worked out, choreographed so that I start brushing a few seconds earlier than Brian so we don’t have to rinse at the same time. I squeezed the toothpaste onto my electric toothbrush, turned it on, and raised it my mouth; unfortunately, my glob of toothpaste fell off of the bristles and onto my lower lip. Brian tittered beside me as I paused and sighed. I then tried to recover the blob by catching it with my brush and nudging it back into my mouth.

Instead of working as planned, the whizzing electrical bristles jammed into the goo and then vibrated down and around my chin. Frantically I continued my attempt to corral the toothpaste back into my mouth but the spinning head just wove a complex path along the left side of my jaw and back up my cheek, leaving a snail trail of foamy goo behind it.

“What are you doing?!” said Brian, stifling a laugh.

“Bruffing my teef!” I wailed.

“Why don’t you turn the toothbrush off?!”

I opened my mouth to explain, then realized he was absolutely right. I cut the power, applied a new dose of paste to the bristles, then placed it carefully in my mouth before flipping the switch. Crisis averted, Brian felt no further compunction to suppress his guffaws.

I’m grateful to have Brian because he stops me from pouring litres of cleaning fluid all over myself, or polishing my chin to shiny brilliance. I suspect Brian is grateful to have me, too...because everyone needs a good laugh.