1. Your smile, though somewhat rare, melts my heart.
2. I love it when you attempt to make me laugh when I am trying to be grumpy…
3. Your first priority is always the happiness of your children.
4. Those times when you are braver than me.
5. Your honesty can always be counted on.
6. Your faithfulness is impeccable and gives me no cause to be afraid or jealous.
7. Gentleness with your children is boundless.
8. Your attempts to make me laugh, especially when I am trying NOT to be grumpy…
9. I love enjoying old black and white movies with you.
10. I love discovering and being engrossed in TV shows with you, from a decade of X-Files and Fringe to Friends to That 70s Show to Bones and everything in between.
11. Your unrelenting cynicism challenges me to be smarter and never a lazy thinker.
12. I love how to refuse to give up even when the odds are against you, accomplishing things that would have daunted a “normal” person.
13. I’m proud to be a geek with you, sharing comic book movies and wacky movie self-references.
14. Your face.
15. Your hands.
16. I love how you would never even think of giving in to peer pressure. You do things because you want to, not because someone else thinks you should.
17. I love how you want to run away and see the world with me.
18. I love how you love to read boring old books.
19. I love how you love to scour flea markets for boring old books (and maps and uniforms and flags and cameras)
20. I love how so many of the things that define me as an adult came from suggestions from you, not because I conform to you (we both know I don’t) but because you understand me on a fundamental level.
21. For giving me the opportunity to stay home with our children.
22. For continuing to love me even though things have been hard sometimes and I am not always lovable.
23. Your love of baseball, hard rock, fart jokes, and other things that make you completely different from me but so very much yourself.
24. Your love of fantasy, sci-fi, travel, the woods, the ocean, our children, video games, and other things that we have so much in common.
25. The way you humor things that I want to give a try even though the odds are that I will fail.
26. Your intelligence.
27. Your physical strength.
28. Your deep, untouchable goodness.
29.
30. Your loyalty to family.
Happy Birthday, Lee. May the next thirty years be rich and filled with good things for you.