Parenting UberMoment

Post written by Steve Otto. Follow me on Twitter.

What Four Year Old Boys Admire

This past weekend we went camping with my side of the family. My wife’s idea of a vacation is finding a nice hotel with a pool and hot tub, so she gives us one day a year to actually break out the tent and go camping. Although I must say she’s enjoying it more each time we go so next year we may double our stay.

On the way back from our camping trip we stopped at a Splash Park with the rest of our family. Between my two older brothers and I we have eight kids, and only two of them are girls. Six boys between the ages of three and nine can provide all kinds of entertainment. You never know what is going to happen.

The splash park proved to be lots of fun and accomplished our goal of wearing out the kids enough for them to fall asleep during the rest of our ride home. As I was bringing Jacob to the Men’s Room to change him out of his suit and back into some dry clothes he spotted something that he felt the need to point out to me.

We walked past a woman who was sunbathing and that apparently caught Jacob’s eye. “Dad, look!! Look!!!” he said with excitement as he was trying to turn my head to look in this girl’s direction. (I’m realizing as I write this, that no matter how carefully I try to describe the girl or this situation, I will land in some level of trouble with my wife. So I hope you appreciate what I’m sharing here.)

I tried to appease Jake by offering him a, “Yeah, that’s great buddy!” not realizing that he wasn’t pointing out the sunbathing girl, but his keen eyes had noticed something entirely different, entirely more valuable, and way more exciting to him. I was a little relieved that Jake’s hormone’s weren’t kicking into overdrive prematurely, when he shared the object of his excitement, “It’s a Batman Towel, Dad!”

The story doesn’t end there. When you find something so exciting like a Batman Towel, you can’t just keep it to yourself. You gotta share that with your friends. So when we arrived back at base camp, a small tree just outside the water section of the park, Jake filled in his cousins on this amazing find. So before long, Jake brought one of his cousins, Michael, over to check out this treasure. The two walked right up to the girl as Jake pointed out the famous batman logo that covered the towel she was laying on.

As they came back to the tree again, wearing their innocent smiles, they invited a third cousin, Luke, to check out this masterpiece. At that point I quickly grabbed a camera to capture this moment. I did my best to grab a quick snapshot without looking like some stalker taking pictures of sunbathing women. I can only image the conversation going on as the three stood around the girl staring down and admiring the fine craftsmanship of the towel. “Must be at least 600 thread count,” Jake says while pointing out the towel, “Bruce Wayne would demand no less.”

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