He ain't heavy, he's my brother...

When son number two did an Elvis and left the building some years ago, the husband suggested that I should stop cooking for him every night.  After all, I was working too and he was more than capable of finding something to eat - these were his words, not mine, before you start feeling sorry for the silly old fool.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I started feeling a bit guilty about this and suggested to the husband that I would make him a small nourishing meal each evening which I hoped would stop him from eating my body weight in cheese and crackers each night.  'Are you saying I need to lose some weight?' he asked.   

Now as anyone with a pulse would know, this is dangerous territory, but after some rapid internal brainstorming, I came up with a reason somewhere along the lines of wanting to have a sit down together before we headed off to the sleep-inducing recliners we've just had delivered.

Well it worked, and for the past ten days or so, he's been getting some lovely meals.  These have ranged from simple sausage and mash to a rather tasty Singapore curry, and he's been very happy to sit and eat with me each evening after work and listen while I drone on about my day at Binland.  He is perfectly used to this by the way, and can get almost as excited as I can by rubbish.  So it was all good, and I was feeling quite saintly in the wife department.

Till Tuesday morning...

Like most people, we have a set of scales in our bathroom, and the husband hops on them once every few weeks just to make sure that he's not losing his boyish good looks. This Tuesday, I heard him get on, make some kind of noise which was midway between disgust and disbelief, and then he got on them again.

'There's something wrong with the scales', he said.  'I think they need new batteries'.

'I only put some in a few weeks ago, so they should be fine'.

Silence from the bathroom...

Well ladies, the long and the short of it is that the husband put on 5lbs and I managed to add 3lbs in the ten days, so the evening dinners have been put on the virtual back burner for the foreseeable future.

So you see, being a good wife is not all it's cracked up to be.

Especially where a pair of work trousers is concerned...