The Day Spidey Moved In...

This past Saturday was a chilly, rainy, dreary day here in Louisville.

I had the boys for the weekend, and since our trip to the park didn't happen, we were pretty much inside all day.

In the early afternoon, while the kids were being themselves---which of course means fighting, arguing, yelling and screaming at each other and goading the dog into barking as loudly as she can---I decided that it was time to get the dishes done.

Washing dishes is so much fun that I became lost in the bubbly joy of a sinkful of dirty dishes and water hot enough to dissolve my fingerprints away.

Yes.

Yes, there is sarcasm in the above sentence.

At any rate, I lost track of time while doing this most mindless and menial of tasks, and worked away a good forty-five minutes before I realized that I could no longer hear the boys.

Lest you fail to understand the depths of my fear, let me stress: the boys--my boys--were quiet.

Silence from them means cooperation, and this never bodes well for me.

Then, so quietly that I almost couldn't hear them at all, there came...whispering.

This bodes even worse than the silence.

"Boys," I called out, trying not to show my fear through the cracking of my voice (you must never let my boys see your fear--they know fear, and thrive on it). "What are you guys doing in there?"

"Nothing. C'mere, Dad."

"Why?"

"No reason. Just c'mere."

Well, this just keeps getting better and better.

Against my better judgement (I am a dad, and left most of my better judgement by the roadside long ago), I decided to play along and see what they had been getting into.

I left the kitchen, and though I tread lightly, I did not tread lightly enough to prevent falling over the tripwire of thread which now ran along the floor of the dining room.

I had time to realize "Hey, I'm falling..." before I fell into, and snapped through (yes, there was pain involved in this), the five-foot-high web of thread that they had spent the last forty-five minutes weaving, with ninja-like silence, across the open spaces of the dining room.

I found myself lying on the floor, quite entangled in the threads that had wrapped around me as I fell through them.

As I lay there, Blake knelt down and whispered in my ear.

"Dad?"

"Yes, Blake?"

"We set a Spider-Man trap for you."

"Oh. Ow."

The boys found this quite hilarious, and cackled away like the criminally insane fiends they are.

Once I had disentangled myself and managed to get up, I had a talk with the boys about how I'm sure they had fun, and I was certainly happy that they had spent so much time working together, but that this was not necessarily the best way to showcase their creativity.

After all was said and done, we all laughed (it really was funny in retrospect), and went on to enjoy the rest of our Saturday.

You see, I couldn't really be angry at them, because when I was a kid, I did the exact same thing to my dad. In the same room, even.

The only difference being that my dad wasn't doing dishes at the time, he was outside doing something manly like ripping up tree trunks or building a motorcycle or something like that.

And I remember his response being a bit different when I told him I had set the trap. His response was more along the lines of "So you have. And now, you will die."

I'm not going to lie; it hurt. But at the end of the day, it didn't hurt all that much, and gave me some good time with my boys, while triggering memories of the same kinds of fun with my dad, thirty years ago.

It seems I've come full circle.

If nothing else, my boys are learning what they can accomplish if they work together.

And yes, that part scares me.

A lot.
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Thanks for reading my ranting,

Brad