By NICOLE CARTRETTE
Staff Writer

It’s after midnight. My husband carefully slides his house key into the door and gently glides it open, hoping the hinges won’t squeak this time. He ignores the light switch and tiptoes to the bed room doing everything he cannot to wake me.

It’s not the first night and it won’t be the last that he comes home late.

My husband’s mistress is an XBOX and a handful of other folks equally fascinated with video gaming.

It’s amazing what kind of leverage in the give-and-take relationship of marriage that a few nights a month can get you. I have been told some of the wives have been bribed with shopping sprees.

It’s rumored some of the husbands may have gone so far as to go along on these trips to the mall – and actually carried the purchases – in exchange for an XBOX night. Though I have not yet joined the ranks of those wives, I’m working on it.

The truth is, I don’t mind every once in a while spending the evening watching something other than the Sci-Fi Channel, not complaining about my husband’s smelly feet, or beating him to bed before his snoring sets in.

I suppose my not complaining too much about his eagerness to spend hours on end in video gameland outweighs his desire to take out the trash or load the dishwasher and says a lot about our relationship.

I must give him credit for not really holding me to the agreement that whoever takes the baby to daycare in the morning gets to drive the new car.
He doesn’t gripe too much when I am working late and he is racking up brownie points being Mr. Mom. I must say the box gets very little of my husband’s time compared to the time he spends with our little girl.

My husband has also been known to sneak off early on a Saturday morning with the baby in tow. I think our child is in the running for the youngest little girl to ever sit at the old men’s table at Our Place.

I have to give him credit for overcoming his fear of the dirty diaper and applaud his ability to spring from the bed for a 3 a.m. bottle-feeding.

He tells some pretty interesting stories, even if he does throw unusual twists into classic fairy tales. I can only hope that one day our daughter will realize that the Three Bears do not live in Clarkton and that Goldilocks was not really one of his court-appointed clients.

My sister-in-law told me one Sunday that we knew how our husbands were before we married them, and women, therefore, shouldn’t expect them to change. While it is true to some degree that we can’t change them, I joked that I could keep trying.

I knew what my husband was not when I met him (a housekeeper, bargain shopper, etc). While this causes me some stress, all that he has become as a daddy and husband really makes it all come out in the wash.

So, I will give him a few nights with the box and he will give me a few Saturday mornings sleeping in and a day with the girls. It’s a little like one of those video games – you win some and you lose some, but you always keep playing.