{Falling for You}

"I've been spending all my time just thinking 'bout you.  I don't know what to do, I think I'm falling for you..."

When I walked down that isle toward his scared smile, I didn't know.  I was head over heels, that's for sure.  But I had no idea that there could be more.

The thrill of new, young, exciting love is intoxicating.  Something that people chase after with reckless abandon, sometimes leading to their very undoing.  The first time lips touch is like a firecracker going off and down you plummet.  Some people go from one love to the next, constantly searching out a fix for their addiction to the thrill of the new.  We've got all the love songs to prove it.

I've been married 10 years next January.

I pick up socks and pack lunches.  I pay medical bills and vacuum rugs.  I require a kiss each morning and every night.  I say "I love you" at the end of every phone call and expect a response.

Despite all that, the mundane that comes along after a decade of being one with another, I've discovered a lesser acknowledged passion.  I've fallen in love with a married dad of 5.

That young puppy love of 10 years ago, with all it's selfish passion and unyielding ego, could never in a million years compare to how it feels to watch a man adore a child you made together.  Those sparks when your fingertips touched for the first time can't touch the tightness in my heart when his rough man hands scoop up silky soft baby.  I watch the way his muscles flex when he tosses him in the air, the tenderness with which he covers that giggling face with kisses and I am a goner.

It's all well and good to fall in love with a man with nothing to take care of but his very own self.

It is another thing completely to see how he treats the small and the helpless, how he shoulders responsibility and how, in all his strength and power, his eyes go all soft and gentle when his baby smiles up at him.

With the arrival of each new little person into this family of ours, I fall deeper and deeper in love.  10 years together and this bond of ours grows stronger with each passing day.