The starving beasts await their meal
We took a rather easy day today. The original plan was that I would take the spawn off to the beach or somewhere while the womenfolk cleaned and primped, but the kids managed to amuse themselves without much parental intervention and the cleaning went faster than expected (due to focus, two moms, or lowered expectations, who can say?). So I hung out keeping a general eye on the kids and doing the Dadly things of helping move furniture and being usefully tall.
The kids played on the sailboat at the dock, tried fishing (especially Charles) and visited a local friends house. At one point Charles, Wolf, and Alice headed down the street on bikes and scooters. I thought I would tag along rather than have a 4 and 5 year old lead by a 7 year old on the streets. This upset Alice enormously and eventually she had a major meltdown, screaming at me in the street and telling me what an evil Daddy I was for being near her. Charles and Wold meanwhile had found their target play place and were having fun, but Alice refused to join them unless I left, which I didn’t. After a while, Charles and Wolf asked me to come over and help push on the swing, leaving Alice crying on the street corner. She did that for a while until a neighbor came by and asked her why she was crying. This frightened Alice sufficiently to forgive Dad for his presence and come over to play with the rest of us. Naturally, Alice wanted to ride on the swing and have Dad pushed. I pointed out the opprobium that Alice had heaped upon me and how this was demotivating with regard to pushing Alice on the swing. Alice immediately said she was sorry and that I was a very nice Daddy.
The tree with the swing had huge seed pods (over two feet long for the particularly big ones) that rattled when dried, so I chased Charles and Wolf with my evil rattling seed pods. I found a lead fishing weight while searching for seeds from the pods to show the boys. I gave the weight to Charles and told him it was a Charles seed and that’s we had planted some to make our Charles.
Charles: I found some Alice seeds!
Dad: Those aren’t Alice seeds.
Charles: How do you know?
Dad: I planted the Charles and Alice seeds so I know what they look like.
Charles: So are these Wolf seeds?
Dad: I don’t know, I didn’t grow Wolf.
Wolf: Wolf seeds are gray.
After all that adventure we had a very lovely dinner with much good food and everyone ate too much. One of the guests remained behind to be torured by Sarah and I. We had to move out to the back porch because Bear demanded “dark and silence” so he could sleep in the TV room with Charles, Bear, and Alice (Corwin having already fled to Bear and Wolf’s normal sleeping quarters). But we didn’t move fast enough and Bear was forced to make the long trek upstairs to his bed. Mom tried to put Alice up there, in the top bunk (because that’s special) but Corwin whined too much and Alice was sent back to the couch in the TV room.