When my wife and I argue, it’s about how our eldest child was conceived

I recently read that money is the number one thing that people say they argue about most in marriage.

Arguing about the children is second on the list.

To be honest, my wife and I don’t argue very much, and when we do, it’s never about money or children.

We are both frugal as hell and want little in terms of material possessions, so we are almost always on the same page in terms of money.

And as teachers, we both understand the importance of presenting a unified front to our children, so we avoid disagreements about parenting in front of the kids. By the time we are finally alone and able to argue about a particular parenting decision, we’ve often forgotten the disagreement altogether.

No, when my wife and I argue, it is typically about our differing recollections of the past. I recall an event occurring one way, and she recalls it happening another way. An argument then ensues, with each person steadfastly defending his or her specific memory of the situation.

A perfect example, as off this is, oddly enough, how our first born was conceived. I thought that I was holding the frozen corn at the time of conception and Elysha thought that she was.

Luckily, I write to my daughter (and now my son) every day and post those messages to a blog for them to read someday, so when this particular disagreement arose, we were able to look back in the blog’s archive and determine who was correct.

Here is the post detailing our daughter’s conception, including the answer to the question about who was holding the corn:

Actually, here’s how it really happened.

Your mom wanted to get pregnant very badly. I did as well, but with your mom, it became a full time job. She was taking daily basal temperature readings and using online software to calculate her precise cycle, pinpointing the time in which she ovulated to the day.

Thanks to this intense data-gathering, it has never been so easy for me to wake her up in the morning. I’d tell her that it was time to take her temperature, and rather than groaning like an old house and falling back asleep, she’d immediately pop the thermometer in her mouth.

With your mom, little one, it’s typically all or nothing.

So we had been trying to get pregnant for one whole month without success and your mom was having a fit. Even though it takes many couples six months, a year, or more to become pregnant, your mom was near panic after missing pregnancy on our first try. We were 0-1 and she was acting like George Steinbrenner. 

I expected to be traded any day.

With her next ovulation period approaching, your mom had managed, through the use of this software, to identify precise day of greatest fertility, and though we were fooling around for the days and weeks before this day, Tuesday, May 6th was a red-letter day on our calendar. Our next real shot at getting pregnant.

The whole process sounds quite romantic and spontaneous, doesn’t it? 

On that fateful Tuesday night, disaster struck. While cooking dinner, your mom reached for a pan, forgetting that it had come out of the oven just moments before. She burned her hand badly, and having worked in restaurants for years, I know how painful a burn like this can be. Throughout the night we rotated frozen bags of vegetables in and out of her hand to reduce the pain. In the back of my mind, I thought that we had probably missed our chance at getting pregnant this month. With a hand so badly burned, there was no chance that we would be fooling around that night.  

Silly me.

When it came time for bed, your mom’s hand was no better, but she stepped into the bedroom with a bag of frozen corn in her hand, declaring herself ready and able to make a baby. Admittedly, I had my doubts. Her hand was a deep red and I expected blisters to form before long. But your mom was a trooper and pushed through the pain.

I suspect that for the first time in human history, a couple had sex while the woman clung to a bag of frozen corn.  

And it worked. Amidst the thermometers and online software and frozen corn, you were conceived that evening.

Let me apologize ahead of time for the lifetime of frozen corn jokes that I have lined up for you.