My husband has a head for numbers. Golf scores. Football scores. Route numbers. Banking. Anything but our kids’ and grandkids’ birthdays, though he does have a ballpark idea of those. When your family grows, it gets harder to keep track. Combine that with getting older, and it’s much harder to keep track. But he has me, and so far, so good with me remembering the important dates. (Full disclosure, I keep them written down as a failsafe. Don’t tell Bob.)

Remembering these dates is important in order to celebrate with our family and show them some birthday love, but it’s also important to gain access to our house. We have combination lock entries, and I love them because we can tell our code to people who need to get in if we aren’t home, and we also don’t have to carry a key. I hate them because sometimes the batteries die, and we have no idea where the “key” is in case that happens. Of course, it only happens when we are trying to get back in the house – never when we’re leaving. But since we have multiple entries with combinations, we have not been locked out yet. Or I should say I have never been locked out.

Bob told me I could pick out the combinations as he knows numbers vex me. Figuring out a code for our entry keypads was almost as bad as having to come up with a gazillion other passwords to keep our banking, Facebook account, streaming services, Amazon account, different doctors, hospital, funeral home, and on and on ad nauseam. Therefore, I came up with a plan that I would never forget because of the way I think. As it turns out, that also means that Bob will never remember because of the way he thinks.

Without giving you access to our home, my thinking went something like this. Start with my age when Bob and I started dating and find the square root of that number – round up. That’s the first digit.

For digit number two, start with the number of times our daughter texted me that week and subtract the total number of times that our sons texted me. Divide that by four and round up.

For the third digit, I measured the hypotenuse of the smallest triangle that hangs over Bob’s workbench. Easy.

The fourth digit was tough, so I used the combined age of Bob and me when we were married and then subtracted that from our current ages. I used the first digit of that number just to keep it simple.

Seriously, I don’t even understand half of what I just wrote. I had to look up the word hypotenuse! But, I did use information about our family as the keys to our code, and I filled Bob in on these magical numbers that my amazing mind came up with. The end result: Bob was locked out one time too many, so he created a separate code just for him. These keypads take more than one code! That’s a marriage saver!

P.S A big announcement is coming soon!