“Liam, can you think of anything else we need from the store?”

“Bread.”

“Yep, we’ve got that.”

“Um… Crackers.”

“Good one. Anything else?”

“And… a fort to build?”

Everyone is happy. We’re on the cusp of a weekend. Bill is freshly home from work. He sits on the kitchen floor and pulls Nate into his lap and wraps his arms around him.

“Hey Buddy! Do you know what day tomorrow is?!”

“What?!”, asks Nate, beaming up at his favorite person in the world.

“After tomorrow, Da-da doesn’t have to go to work for the next day and the next day! We can be buddies!”

“What day?!”, Nate squeals.

“It’s a day that starts with ‘F’,” I say. I blow air through my top teeth, perched on my bottom lip. “fuh-fuh-fuh.”

“What day starts with the ‘fuh‘ sound, Nate?” asks Bill.

Nate waits a beat, lights up, and excitedly screams, “FURSDAY!”

“Water tastes good out of my hands because my skin isn’t all grown up like yours. Your skin is all stickin’ out.”

-Liam, on dermatology, gerontology, and drinking from the bathroom sink

Jill: “Look at them! There are THREE of them!”

Bill: “I know!”

Jill: “What were we THINKING? Why did we do that?”

Bill: “I know!”

Jill: “No really! What were we thinking?”

Bill: “I don’t know.”

“Da-da, cook macaroni,” said Liam, obviously forgetting who was in charge.

“Was that a nice ask?”

“Cook macaroni please,” he corrected.

I didn’t really feel like cooking macaroni. They’d just had it the evening before, and besides, it takes like, four minutes to make, and that’s four minutes after the microwave is lit. Plus, Nate had done something with one of the cheese packets from the previous night’s macaroni-making, and I never could find it, so I’d had to take another from the clear, crinkly bag of hard little elbow noodles that Liam was currently holding.

“Actually, you know what? We don’t have any cheese,” I lied. “Yep. Mum-mum needs to get more cheese the next time she goes to the store.” Case closed. Now eat your dinosaur chicken.

“No Da-da, look!” he said, disappearing into the pantry.

Uh-oh, I thought, knowing this day would come. Knowing that eventually, their little nervous systems and cognitive abilities would advance to the point where it was no longer so easy to trick them about things like powdered cheese.

Moments later, he emerged, holding a new, complete packet of macaroni. “Here’s cheese.” He said, as he handed it to me and walked back to his chair.

Technically, that was not a nice ask, I thought as I got the microwave-safe bowl down from the cabinet, and remembered who was in charge.

Bill: “How were they today?”

Jill: “Okay. They played with Play-Doh this afternoon.”

Bill: “Yeah, I saw the circle of white dolphins on the table when I came in.”

Jill: “And Nate spilled his apple juice right in the middle of it all. He came running into the kitchen and I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying, except “Spill-t”. Can you think of a worse combination of two substances together than apple juice and Play-Doh? I just threw it all away.”

Bill: “Were we supposed to save those dolphins? Because I put them back in the can.”

Jill: “No. There was also a circle of orange dolphins, but it was a casualty of the apple juice wave.”

Bill: “The circle of orange dolphins was a casualty of the apple juice wave?”

Jill: “Yes.”

Bill: “That sounds like something someone would say would say in an old spy movie.”

Jill: “What would it mean?”

Bill: “It could be code for ‘although it seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess this exchange wasn’t really worthy of a blog entry, and now I have no good way to end it. Post compromised! Abandon authentic dialog and GET OUT NOW!’”

Jill: “That’s wordy. Why not just stop typing?”

Bill:

“You want two burgers?”

…pause…

“Okay.”

“You know, you don’t have to say yes, just because I ask you if you want somethting.”

“I know. It’s just that I think that maybe I don’t want it, until I hear you say it. And you wouldn’t be suggesting it if it wasn’t a good idea, so I go with it. Usually the last thing I hear always sounds best. That’s why I should never be on a jury.”

“Yeah, defense counsel would totally want you.”

…pause…

“Is she hot?”