First Snow Man

On Saturday, cousin Finn came over sans Steve around lunchtime. After theoretically eating, they commenced whatever it is they do in between one of them crying.

As customary every week, I slid downstairs to play Xbox for as long as I could before one of them started crying. A couple of games in, I felt this pang. What am I doing down here? It’s beautiful outside. Balmy. And I’m just sitting here in the dark playing Titan fall. You gotta get those boys outside, man. You’re missing their entire childhood in front of this damned box.

Now, this had absolutely nothing to do with how crappy I was playing and had minutes earlier thrown my Xbox controller across the room.

I raced upstairs declared it time to go to the park. It’s a beautiful day out, guys. What’s wrong with you? You’re missing your entire childhoods in front of a damned box. The boys ran from me, screaming. Luckily, I am still big enough to manhandle three boys under the age of 10 and we were at the park in minutes.

After a few minutes throwing the ball to Grover, I noticed how nice and packable the snow was. So I began throwing snowballs at the boys. They begged me to continue but I could see a snow down the back of the coat incident on the horizon.

“Who here has ever made a snowman?” I asked.

No hands went up. I pulled at my collar, Rodney Dangerfield style. Okay. Okay. There was still some time to salvage some childhoods here.

We commenced making a pretty great snowman. He had sticks for arms. Leaves for eyes and a mouth and some pretty great pine needles for hair.

Elijah said, “Watch this.”

I said, “No snow wieners.”

Eli stopped packing.

We stood back and marveled at our guy. I asked that we name him, for blog purposes. But they wouldn’t indulge me. I gathered them up and squatted down.

“Okay guys. I’m going to give you a life lesson here. The very minute we leave here, some kid is going to smash our snowman. We can either walk away and know that snowman is doomed, or we can put him out of his misery.”

The boys attacked the snowman with a ferocity that made me a little uncomfortable. Shortly after the boys realized just how wet and cold they all were. We walked back home and resumed letting our childhoods slip away.