Bubs rotted in bed with me all day yesterday--as "payment," the time I "ruined" his poker night with his buddies.

 Yesterday was a dream day for me—I got to spend all day in bed with my husband and baby. I don’t know if it gets any better than that. Of course, because I have a rambunctious little 7-year-old who lives to make his 9-year-old sister mad—and I’m hosting my 25-year-old brother, who apparently wants to have the same effect on his fiancée—yesterday had its moments. But as a mom of three, I have to take the good with the bad.

After some sleep regression, our almost 7-week-old has really been sleeping like a little queen—it’s been amazing. So it was a total surprise to be woken up by my 9-year-old daughter just after 5 a.m.: “Hey Mom, me and Evie [my brother’s fiancée] can’t sleep—she thinks we can take the dogs to the big park for a long walk before it gets too hot? Is that okay?”

It melted my heart. It was so sweet on both of their parts, because our three rescue dogs have definitely been feeling a little neglected (and cooped up) thanks to the baby and the oncoming summer heat. I fell back asleep wondering how I got so lucky with my daughter and future sister-in-law.

Maybe an hour later I was woken up again—this time by the scurrying and giggling of what sounded like two very young boys in the hallway. I ran smack into my 7-year-old, who looked like he was gearing up for the Nerf dart gun apocalypse.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing, Mom. Me and Brian [my 25-year-old brother] are going to shoot Abby and Evie with about a million Nerf darts when they walk through the door!”

“TJ—No. NO. N. O. No.”

He looked dejected and walked off. I guess it was unclear to him why setting up dozens of Nerf guns to assault the two sweetest people in the house would be a problem. As he rounded the corner, I heard my brother whisper, “It’s okay, bud. We just need to be quieter—we can still pull it off.”

I turned around and looked my brother dead in the eye and said, “Brian, I am still able and very willing to beat the shit out of you. Take your little nephew here and get out of my house.”

“Where are we supposed to go, sis? You live in the boonies.”

“I don’t care—go be helpful to Abby and your fiancée. Before she wakes up to you like the rest of us have.”

“Fine.”

And with that, Bubs got home from his run, took a shower—and I had a nice, quiet house for nearly the whole day, just me, my husband, and the baby. Bubs has a nearly impossible time sitting still, but it was so nice just to have him in bed with me that I promised him I’d reward him by writing up another blog from our past. He thinks this one is cute, I guess…I’m never sure how these strolls down memory lane will be received by anyone outside our family—but he deserves it.

Here goes:

Bubs and I “unofficially” lived together at the start of our sophomore year of college. Officially, I still lived in the dorms and he had used some of his college money to rent an off-campus apartment. From the get-go, I stayed just about every night because Bubs’ roommate was a graduate student who was always doing research out in the oil patch. I loved staying over. I didn’t love that his bathroom regimen consisted of leftover hotel soap and stolen gym towels—which meant that my bathroom regimen, when I stayed there, also consisted of leftover hotel soap and stolen gym towels. Yuck.

Since his roommate was gone all the time, I basically told Bubs I may as well move in and bring my girly stuff with me (but keep the dorm room so my dad didn’t officially chop Bubs’ balls off). It was a dream come true—finally, domestic bliss. It only took us seven years of dating! We were getting up there at the ripe age of 20.

It was about two weeks in when Bubs said he was going to go play poker with the guys.

Wait. What? Umm, I’m sorry if no one told you, but we live together now. That entails waking up and singing Taylor Swift songs while we cook breakfast together. We tickle each other while brushing our teeth together. We get huge smiles when our hands brush while we both reach for the remote to watch TV together.
Did you notice the word together in all those statements?

Poker night? Um, no.

I was actually heartbroken when Bubs made plans with his poker buddies. I threw a very mature, totally well-reasoned mini-tantrum and acted like a manipulative little brat. He offered the compromise: come with. And I, not understanding the sacred silence of male recreational bonding, said yes.

So I showed up. Cute top, cute jeans—it took me forever to pick them out. I guess I should have used that time to go on the internet, because I had absolutely no grasp of poker. It was weird from the start. Bubs and I walked into a small apartment in our complex where three guys were already sitting silently around a table. Bubs said “hey.” The three guys said “hey.”
I said, “Hi guys! How’s it going? Thank you so much for letting me come tonight! I’m so excited!”

Apparently that was weird—all four men in the room gave me an odd look.
I’m odd?

When you enter a room with people you haven’t seen in a while, you hug, you gush, you tell them how cute they look, you ask how their mom is doing and who they’re dating. I guess I was wrong, because when the last two guys showed up, they said “hey,” and the other four guys said “hey,” and I finally just said “hey,” which I guess somewhat made up for my social faux pas.

I sat next to Bubs and tried to play. I really did. But I’m what you might call… unserious. I can’t shuffle. I forget the rules. I kept picking up my cards the wrong way, which earned me an angry rebuke from the serious men around the table. I probably asked if a flush beat a straight at least twice. Bubs got that tight-lipped look that means he’s both embarrassed and trying not to snap at me in front of people.

And to make things worse, the vibe was… solemn. These guys were nice. Polite. Very straight-faced. Occasionally they’d crack a poker joke (did you even know those existed?) and all of them would laugh at something that may as well have been classical Greek to me.

I was bored out of my damn mind.

About 30 minutes in, I realized why the guy across the table looked familiar. I couldn’t place his name, but it hit me—he was dating my friend Jessica, who I hadn’t seen in a long time.

So I leaned across the table, totally interrupting the game, and asked, “Wait—you’re the guy dating Jessica Gwinnet! I haven’t seen her in forever, how is she? She is such a sweetheart.”

He blinked like a deer in headlights.
“Ummm, I actually wouldn’t know…we broke up before the end of last semester. Haven’t talked to her.”

“Oh no,” I said, way too dramatically. “What happened?”

I didn’t realize this would open the floodgates—but it did. He looked around awkwardly and then said, “She said I wasn’t emotionally available.”
You could tell that was the stock answer—the chuckle that came with it was the universal male signal for let’s end this convo and pretend it didn’t hurt.

But I knew there was more. I gave him my biggest, most genuine I care about you eye flash and said, “I know it’s been a long time, but when she talked about you, ‘emotionally unavailable’ wasn’t how she described you.”

He looked visibly relieved. Like someone had taken the cap off a soda bottle he’d been shaking for months. And then he just… started talking. Pouring his heart out about the kind of college romance that was supposed to go the distance.

The other guys? They started asking questions too. They cared. They’d just never known how to ask. They wanted to show up for him but didn’t know how to break the ice.

The one fuddy-duddy at the table?
Bubs.
The one guy who pretty much knew he had me on lockdown and would have to go nuclear for me to ever leave him. He could afford to sit back and say, “Umm, can we keep the game moving here? We haven’t played a hand in five minutes.”

I didn’t mean to turn this into a roundtable discussion about the fragile ecosystem of dating in your early twenties. But once one guy opened up, the rest followed—without me prompting, without me being like, “So who else here has a crush?”

It was just… I was there, and I was listening, and they could tell I wasn’t judging them.

They weren’t ladies’ men—not in a sad way, just in the way a lot of good guys are. The kind who don’t know what to say to women, so they don’t say anything. The kind who think you need abs, or a motorcycle, or a devastating jawline to be noticed.

I said something like, “Most girls just want someone who’s brave enough to say hi. We don’t bite.”

One of them actually laughed and said, “Some girls do.”

“Okay, fair,” I said. “But not most of us. And even if we do bite—it’s the good kind! Right, Bubs?”

He groaned. “Can we please just play cards?”

The game technically continued, but the vibe had shifted completely. I was playing—sort of. I still didn’t know what I was doing, but now the guys were laughing when I messed up instead of groaning. We had beers, we laughed, we turned on music, and the table came alive.

These poor guys went from silence and strategic bluffing to actively encouraging each other to ask women out. One even pulled out his phone to show me a text from a girl he hadn’t responded to in three days and asked, “What do I say?”

I chided him first: “Three days? Dude! Come on!” Then I grabbed his phone and typed out a response like an early version of ChatGPT. He read it, smiled, and hit send. A minute later, his phone buzzed—and the look on his face lit up like a kid on Christmas.

Bubs was quietly dying inside.

“Can we move the game along?” he muttered every ten minutes.

I smiled sweetly. “One sec, babe. I’m teaching your friends how to flirt.”

On the walk back to OUR apartment, he said, “You hijacked poker night.”

I said, “I saved it.”

He made a noise that was somewhere between a grunt and a sigh. “They just wanted to play poker.”

“We did play poker. It was fun! I can’t wait for the next game!”

He didn’t respond.

I made five new friends that night. Bubs even ended up being a groomsman in one of their weddings. I don’t know for sure—but I like to think my little lessons helped that guy meet his future wife.