Toe in the Water

Kids

Kids

I have come to the conclusion that I’m either a brilliant father or so bad that God keeps trying to train me to be better.

When the first kid came along, I thought, “Okay, that’s twenty years you’ve signed on for - let’s see if you survive this.” It turned out to be easy (he was a very good kid) and so it wasn’t too horrible a shock to find out, towards the end of the twenty years, that there were two late arrivals on the way.

They turned out to be not too bad as well and I was just beginning to enjoy my approaching freedom after another (nearly) twenty years, when God threw an unexpected job at me. This consisted of attempting to educate a bunch of teenagers who had been excluded from school. It was not lost on me that this was a fairly cruel trick to play on me in my fast-approaching old age, but I knuckled down and found that the kids really did seem to gain something from it. I may have been doing something right, most likely as a pure accident.

Then came America and the love of my life. I suppose I should have been unsurprised that she came with a couple of kids dubbed, in her inimitable way, the Girl and the Boy. Well, I kept my nose to the grindstone and we all seemed to survive somehow. They came of age and began to leave into adulthood.

At the last moment, the Boy brought a friend into our lives. Over time he became part of the family and, today, he is back home with us, on a short break from being a Marine and amazing us with his exploits.

I’ve been old for so long now that I have earned the title of Ancient. You might think that I also deserve a rest from kids by this time. Fat chance.

The Girl recently provided us with a grandchild…


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