Right Here!

After dinner last night Baby C decided he wanted to play outside. Actually, he decided this as soon as we got home, but I told him I needed to make dinner first. “Aw, shucks,” he muttered.

I went about my fatherly duties of making dinner. I prepared some yummy chicken alfredo while babies B and C watched Finding Nemo and Baby A did his homework.

After we had eaten and were back in the living room watching Finding Nemo once more, Baby C eventually remembered he wanted to play outside. He came over to me, took my hand, and forcibly yanked me from my seat. Okay, he tried to forcibly yank me from my seat. He’s two, so it didn’t work out quite the way he had planned.

“What do you want, honey?” I asked him.

“Ready to go outside, Daddy,” he answered.

“Oh, you’re ready to go outside now?”

“Okay!” He answers almost every question with an emphatic “okay!”.

“Alright,” I told him, “let me go upstairs and get my shoes on and we’ll go outside to play.”

“Okay, Daddy!”

I sauntered up the stairs and threw on my shoes. Meanwhile I could hear Baby C downstairs telling his brother just how ready to go outside he was, and his brother telling him that I was getting my shoes on and that we’d go outside in a minute. Once I had my shoes on, I exited my room and went to the top of the steps. There waiting at the bottom of the steps for me was Baby C who, upon seeing my shoe-covered feet, exclaimed, “There’s Daddy’s shoes!”

And he was right. My shoes were right there.

When I made it back down the steps, Baby C grabbed his little Mickey Mouse Clubhouse car, which he simply must take with him every time we go outside to play, and looked towards Baby B. “You comin’, Bubby?”

Don’t leave home without it.

Baby B was unaware that he was going anywhere. “Oh, am I going, too?”

“Okay! You ready, Bubby?” Once Baby B turned off Finding Nemo, he was ready.

We went to the park. Baby B and I tossed around the football while Baby C pushed his little car all over the park. He then found that his new shoes had enough grip on them to allow him to climb up the slide, so he began climbing up the slide and then descending the slide head-first. Then he finally got around to the real fun – playing in the dirt. I think he does this solely because he knows he gets a bath out of it every time he gets that dirty.

Dusk began to fall. I gathered my spawn and we headed home, stopping by grandma’s house to say “hi” on the way. I took Baby C upstairs immediately for his bath. I had him cracking up while I was undressing him as I made a show of mock-exertion and fake grunts while I pulled his clothes off, like it was the hardest thing I had ever done. I love hearing him laugh. It is a positively heart-warming sound.

Once he was naked, he took off like a man just released from prison, as he always does in his birthday suit. He ran into the twins room. “You gonna show Bubby your naked butt?” I asked.

Baby C, with all the dignity and charm he inherited from his father, stuck his ass out, pointed to it, and said, “Right here!”

Man, I love that kid.