So the two of them packed up in their warm coats and after a couple of false starts that involved looking for my daughter's favorite toys that she needed to carry in her coat pocket, they were off. This left me with the boy... the boys were left alone ... hmmm, what to do?
"More," my son interrupted my over thinking and answered the question.
He was holding up two nicely hefted wooden disks that go with some toy or other of the fitting together type. One was blue and the other yellow, the former slightly larger than the latter.
"More!" he said with more emphasis and offered me the larger disk, his eyes looking at the two disks as if they were baseballs and this the first day of spring.
Now ever since my older cousin Dan has shown my son that round objects can spin, my little guy has pursued the art with much the same mania as some golfers I've known. He just loves to spin things. And he enjoys this sport even more when he has a partner.
I obliged him and sat down and let the blue one rip.
"Wheee!" he shouted appreciably and set the yellow one to spin next to it.
Now my son doesn't have many words yet. He's up to maybe three dozen independent words that come out as short commands or requests. But together with his wonderfully expressive eyes and clear body language it wasn't too hard to figure out what he was thinking.
"Woah, dude, check that one out ... Dad! Did you see that one wobble and then re-spin - awesome ... Oh Baby! Crash! That was sooo cool!"
We went on like this for maybe a half hour, which is at least 15 minutes longer than the boy would have spun the disks on his own. Sometimes they spun into a foot or each other, but often the two just spun around and around each other like tiny twin tornados or pirouetting dancers.
"Yeah!" he said and looked at me with delighted eyes.
We wrapped up the fun close to 5:30 p.m. - his dinner time - and moved into the more routine part of the evening.
- Fruit, meat, pasta.
- 20 minutes of unsupervised play.
- Bath and splashing
- 20 minutes of unsupervised play.
- Reading Little Bo Peep Can't Get to Sleep
- Bed
By 7:30 p.m. I was on the phone ordering my own dinner from Robongi's (a philadelphia and a spicy tuna roll that I had with a Sierra Nevada Stout from the fridge).
I went up to check on him after a while and he was sleeping peacefully. I was tired and didn't make it much past 9 p.m. that night myself. I put my head down a very happy man.
I love the fact that even now the boy and I can have a little fun on our own. It makes me think of all the things we'll be able to do in the future together between now and the age when he'll want more to be with his friends and then ultimately on his own. It makes me think of all the nights that the boy and I will have the place to ourselves and find something fun to do.
Sometimes being a Dad is a lot of fun.
What do you do when you have one or the other kids for a night?
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