(T)odd jobs.

I keep a Sisyphusian list of around-the-house jobs for Todd to complete on a white board in our kitchen. They are deliberately small, things like reattaching a knob to my bureau or gluing together the Hermey ornament, again. Because I am hilarious, the list is titled (T)odd jobs. There's nothing on the list right now, mostly because Todd was a hero last weekend and got one of the more technically rigorous assignments done. He hung up a mirror my sisters and I decided my mother could do without when she moved to her assisted living place, a mirror that I knew I would use for Marley and Rudy, eventually. And he hung it in the playroom, and then installed a custom-painted barre in front of it for our Tiny Dancers Bean and Toot.

Marley doesn't use a barre much in her ballet class, but she is delighted to have this one ready and waiting for when she knows what to really use it for. And even if Rudy's "dancing" ranges from wagging her head back and forth while "Once Upon A Dream" plays again to racing around the house and screeching while clip-on purple, blue, and pink braids trail from her hair to Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You" (so appropriate for that particular hairstyle), she's at least posed in front of this mirror a few times with her fluffy tutu on.

But then Todd went a step beyond. Last Saturday, I returned the square cork boards I had purchased in a hopeful haze at the newly opened BJs around the corner when I realized each one was less then an eighth of an inch thick and couldn't support even the point of a thumbtack. And Todd rooted through the discarded cork boards that we had been saving for the past few years, one from Heather and the others, I think, from our old house. When I realized that they could all be cut to the same size, twice as big as the BJs ones by the way, and that they could support thumbtacks and pushpins easily, I was the kind of ecstatic that you would expect from someone who gets excited about a gift card to the Container Store. Tidy it up, people! And why didn't we get this Marley and Rudy art display up years ago?

Okay. Imagine I'm saying this like Lynette at the end of an old favorite, An Officer and a Gentleman. The context is all wrong, of course, but the level of congratulatory emotion is the same: "Way to go, Todd! Way to go!"