Dirty talk at bedtime

It is late evening. There is nothing on the TV I feel like watching, I have finished the book I was reading, and I am bored of playing 'Super Smash Brothers' on the Wii. My mind turns, as it always does under similar circumstances, to thoughts of a 'romantic' nature.
I communicate this to my wife by crashing into the living room and announcing, in a voice that I hope is heavy with implication, that: "I am going to bed."
She does not look up from her knitting. "Yes, you should," she says. "You could do with an early night - you look awful at the moment...really tired."
"No," I say, patiently. "I mean that I am going...to bed." I arch my eyebrows in what I hope is a suggestive manner, though the effort is wasted because she still does not look up (which is perhaps just as well, because when I catch sight of myself in the hall mirror I just look confused and angry, which is not the look I was going for at all.)
"Yes, you just said that," she replies, then adds "When you get upstairs, will you check on the girls? You might need to take the little one to the toilet, she had a lot to drink this evening and I'm worried she might wet the bed again..."
I sigh, and decide that subtlety is not getting me anywhere."When I said I was going to bed, what I really meant was that I thought that we could go to bed. Together."
That finally makes her look my way. She realises the full implications of what I am suggesting and wrinkles her nose in faint distaste. I sometimes think my wife considers 'marital relations' in roughly the same way as she thinks about putting the bins out on a Thursday: it's an unwelcome chore to have to do last thing at night and she'd rather she didn't have to do it, but nonetheless she understands that for the smooth running of the household it's necessary that it happens at roughly weekly intervals.

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Hey look, it's the missus...

I am upstairs staring down at the toilet bowl.
It is clear from the evidence in front of me that I am not the first to visit this smallest room today, and that one (indeed, possibly both) of my children have made use of the facilities before me. We have a (haha) backlog situation.
There are two distinct camps when it comes to talking about impending fatherhood: on the one hand you have the whole "That's it, mate - your life is over" hard-drinking school of mock manly despair, and allied against them you have the whole hippy-trippy life-affirming "best thing that will ever happen to you" crowd. For my money, I could have used a more useful, practical assessment of the road ahead, so let me pass this on to impending fathers: when your kids are small, you will spend lot of time wandering around behind them, turning off the lights and running taps that they have left on, stepping on discarded Lego bricks in your bare feet, and flushing toilets.
There will certainly be moments of despair, even anguish- and yes, also wonderful golden soaring moments when your chest threatens to burst with swelling love and pride - but between these moments you will encounter a lot of food mashed into the carpet, pick up a lot of strewn clothes and watch a great many sub par Disney films. You will fruitlessly search toy shops for items that have long sold out. You will inevitably learn, through some unsought and unwanted osmosis, some of the lyrics to High School Musical, and the names of about thirty Pokemon. And for a period of about two years, you will find every toilet in your house has been mysteriously pre-used, and will contain a vile tobacco-coloured liquid that will occasionally not flush away due to the huge volume of toilet paper wedged into the U-bend.
That's the road ahead, fella - my gift to you. Pay it forward.
Of course, everyone has different mechanisms to cope with these trials: I myself like to idly imagine the death, in a huge multi-car fireball, of many of my fellow commuters on the M1 at 8.10 each morning, and I also write this blog. Which brings me, finally to the point of this post: even as I was bending a coat hanger into a suitable shape for clearing blocked sanitaryware, I could hear the tap tap tap of a keyboard downstairs.
This is because my wife now also blogs, but if you were to visit her site you would never believe (a) that we lived in the same house or (b) that she remained married to me.
This is because her blog is chock-full of nice things: of soft furnishings and ribbons, and colour swatches and LOTS of cake. She one did a post about fabric, and a woman in a trendy New York loft commented how much she liked her typeface selection. This is clearly not a world I either know or understand, but as she continually directs site traffic over here (very few visitors stick around, it must be said) it's high time I returned the favour: why not go and see what the woman who married the troll thinks about life? You can find her over here. (Warning: site may contain pictures of cushions, and also people being nice to each other)
Please tell her I sent you. I always need the brownie points...