I had always thought of myself as a fairly conscientious human being before meeting my husband. I balanced my checkbook regularly. I carried a flashlight in my glove box and stayed away from people knowingly infested with flu germs. I voted. I payed taxes. I used my turn signals, visited my dentist biannually, and applied copious amounts of sunscreen to my already tanned skin.

But then Allan came around and suddenly I appeared as careless and apathetic as a swindling financier on house arrest… well… without the smug grin and curfew-monitoring ankle bracelet. I just felt very… negligent, reckless even.

He was/is the walking definition of pragmatism. He is the guy that doesn’t make any major purchases without seek advice from Consumer Reports first. He is the kind of person who not only carries a flashlight in his car but also the sleeping bag, first aid kit, the rain gear and maybe a utility knife, too.

So when our children were born, I was fully prepared for someone who would immediately open college savings accounts and jar his own baby food. What I didn’t realize is that all that careful attention to detail would kind of rub off on me.

I’ll be the first to admit that anyone can go overboard with the whole “conscientiousness” thing. I’ll never really know if withholding any and all foods with sugar for the first year of our children’s lives had momentous beneficial effects. Would a cookie have killed them at Christmas? They aren’t diabetic, so probably not. They didn’t really have lots of teeth to rot away at that point, either. But habits WERE established early on and now they treat sugar with the sort of reverence that I reserve for things like a nice French red at the end of a long, hard day.

I always thought I was something special for cutting white bread out of my family’s diet. But because of my husband, I no longer toss a loaf of bread into my grocery basket simply because the word WHEAT is splashed across the front in bold letters. My new and improved conscientiousness compels me to actually turn the packaging upside down and look at the ingredients in search of words like “stone ground.” I check the fiber percentage, too. I’m suddenly judgmental of boxed food and flowery language on packaging and totally skeptical of words like NATURAL and PURE if red dye #40 and the oh-so ambiguous “spices” are in the concoction.

He generally thinks that I’m not listening when he’s rattling on and on about how sunBLOCK protects better than sunSCREEN, but I do hear him. I agree that $6.99 for a pound of asparagus is too much, and my oil should probably have been changed 2,000 miles ago. (By the way, Resolution #79 is start paying attention to the numbers on that little sticker in the top left corner of my windshield.) So thank you, Allan, for giving me the gift of conscientiousness. I wholeheartedly believe our kids are the better for it.

What obscure resolutions have you made this year if any?