I got up five times last night to make cookies. I also sat back down five times, deciding that it was too late and cookies involved too much work, and I didn’t need the calories anyway. But oh my LORD I craved chocolate chip cookies. Any chocolate, really. And all the chocolate left in the house was tied up in baking ingredients – brownie mix, a tub of chocolate fudge cake frosting, a Costco-sized bag of chocolate chips. Everything that would bring me chocolate required work, which was very discouraging. I moped on the couch with a bowl of strawberries instead.

Dave was surprised that I had no chocolate left in the house. You see, I normally keep a strategic chocolate reserve for this sort of situation.

“Nothing left in your stash?”

“I ate all the bunnies,” I said guiltily, referring to the Lindt Easter bunnies who lived such short, short lives.

“And you have nothing else? You always have more somewhere.” He couldn’t believe I’d let myself get to a zero-chocolate situation.

“Nope, just chocolate chips.”

I headed up to lock the doors on my way to bed, and stopped to play with Horton for a minute, when Dave showed up beside me with a proud smile and a hand extended towards me. In that hand was a small cellophane bag with Santa Claus on it, and three Lindor truffles inside. I crushed the poor man when I told him that those were from two Christmases ago, because I recognized the gift bag from a coworker at the hospital, and I wasn’t at the hospital for Christmas this year. How Lindor truffles survived two years in this house without being eaten is a mystery unto itself, but I felt it was best to throw them out.

A few minutes later, as I was putting on my jammies, I heard a rustling from the closet. I walked over to see what in the world my husband was up to, when he emerged holding one beautiful, shining, silver-wrapped Hershey kiss.

My husband. The provider.

“This is from the most recent Christmas,” he assured me, “so it should still be good. It’s fresh – I had to open a plastic candy cane to get it.”

“So what you’re saying is, you have more.”

He laughed, but I had a plan. “See, honey, you need to keep a chocolate stash around in case mine runs out.” I climbed into bed.

“But you always have some – this situation only comes up a couple times a year, and my chocolate would go bad waiting for your chocolate to run out.” He crossed his arms. “We’d be wasting chocolate.”

“No, it could be like those emergency rations!” I sat up, excited. “If we don’t need to break into them, because we have no emergencies, we’ll just eat them at the end of a six-month period and you can re-stock the emergency kit!”

“So we need a second emergency chocolate stash.”

I grinned. “A chocolate backup!”

“A chocolate redundancy? So we can avoid having a single point of chocolate failure?”

I love us.