Little children are out to get you.

Children will also remind you of why you wake up every morning.
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I’m putting my 3-year-old son, Amiri, to bed.  We’ve just wrapped up a story, and I’m prepared to say good night.  Then, fireworks.  The loud, obnoxious mortar round that seems to surely be knocking the shingles off of someones roof.  The kind that your neighbors light off on the fourth of July — a day that apparently lasts through the months of July and August.  This time a particularly loud one had gone off.  Jarred, my son and I look at each other.

“Your done with that, daddy?”

What he’s saying are my own frustrated words, which I uttered just days ago, the last time someone lit off M80’s just at our curb.  What I actually said before storming out of the door, “I’m done with this!”, as in, if my family has to be startled by one more bang, I’ll put my foot in someones ass.  I do storm out of my house, cursing at the top of my lungs as I march across the lawn in flip-flops, not sure who I would find, if anyone, but ready to scrap in order to salvage peace on my block. 

So he remembered this.  He heard a bang and assumed it was time for Daddy to repeat these actions.

“Your done with this, daddy?”

“Yup, I’m done with this.”

“You gotta go outside and tell the people!”

At this point I’m thinking I should probably do the right thing, and not leave my preschooler with the expection that Daddy goes apeshit when the neighbors get wild. I tried to play it down.

“No, I’m not gonna go outside.  I don’t want to lose my temper.”

He paused.

“… because your temper will leave and you’ll have to find it?”

Little children are trying to ruin your life.  But not him.  He is the best thing on earth.  He is the reason to get up in the morning.  He is the reason to keep myself safe.  He is the reason to eat right, exercise, look both ways before crossing the street, and pay my bills on time.  He very well may be the greatest human being I’ve ever met.