The Married Life: When Your Prince Brings Home A Frog

Say hello to Froggy. Froggy, who works the day shift as a ceramic spoon holder, was on the kitchen countertop next to our sink when I returned home from this morning's run. It's startling to come across a pink and green frog in your kitchen, although not necessarily in a bad way. 

There had been a chili pepper spoon holder in the spot where Froggy sat as recently as the night before, but there was a tragic dishwasher loading accident that I shan't go into here.

I was somewhat distraught at having been the one to break (or kill, whatever) the chili pepper as it had taken us two weeks of shopping, about three years ago, to select it. I'm not kidding. What started as, "We should pick up a spoon holder the next time we're out" somehow morphed into a grand shopping adventure where we visited every kitchen accessorizing store in town as well as Target, Wal-Mart, Kohl's, and K-Mart.

What happened is that we made the mistake of thinking about the process. Once we rejected the first spoon holder as "kind of blah," we spun ourselves into a web of un-meetable expectations. Nothing less would do than a spoon holder that summed up our dreams, ambitions, liberal-leanings, and also contained hints of our charming self-deprecating humor and deep-seated intelligence. 

Yeah, you can see where that got us. Locked in battle in the back aisle of the The Extra Ingredient over whether a spoon holder that said, "Place Spoon Here" better captured our personalities than a holder resembling a jar of olive oil. The chili pepper was a compromise and, really, an attempt to avoid marital counseling. 

Leave it to Blair to solve the problem. "I LOVE the frog!" I shrieked when I spotted it. Blair ambled into the kitchen.

"Took me 5 minutes to pick it out. I knew when I saw it that it was the one."

If there ever comes a time when I doubt our marriage or our compatibility, I will simply walk into my kitchen, make myself a cup of coffee, and rest my spoon on Froggy. And I will be reminded that any man who walks into a cooking store and walks out with a pink and green ceramic frog spoon holder is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the perfect man for me.