. . . why I love my wife -- well, I'll get to that in a minute. First, you need a little background. Here's the thing: I've known and observed a lot of teachers over the years, but I don't know anyone better at teaching small children than my wife. Among other locations, she taught for a few years in a run-down school in Detroit. Most of her students had only one parent at home, if that many. There were few resources, management was awful, and the curriculum imposed from above warrants a prison sentence for several Ph.D.'s in some university Education Department somewhere.

But she made it work. Her children scored in the upper 90th percentiles on the math and verbal sections of the CAT test, while the rest of the city languished in the 60's (the latter an inflated number because of cheating by teachers and administrators, if what she witnessed in her school was an indication of behavior elsewhere).

She gave her children equal measures of love and discipline, and they loved her in return. She excels at teaching, for reasons I don't fully understand. She makes it look as easy, like Michael Jordan used to do for basketball.

But the realities which render me the breadwinner and her the homebound mother are:

1) I can earn far more being pretty good at what I do than she can earn despite being among the best at what she does; and,

2) She is better at the daily tasks of training and teaching our children than I will ever be.

So she stays home, and our family is better for it.

And now to my original point. Today she got a letter from the county government. It's a "Jury Questionnaire," intended to determine whether the recipient belongs among the pool of people who might be summoned in the coming year to pass judgment on their fellow citizens. Among the data requested are "occupation" and "employer."

My wife's answers:

OCCUPATION: homemaker

EMPLOYER: God and my husband

Don't you just love this woman?