Just thinking about my little family caused bursts of happiness to pop through my chest. It seemed I had a limitless capacity to love. Who knew? I’d thought marrying Sam on the beach that day was the pinnacle of all things awesome, but I found that with each addition to our tribe, my heart expanded a little wider. And it gave me a new appreciation for my own parents, who’d raised us all into adulthood with a focus on family, a sense of right and wrong, and clear hearts primed for love.
I picked up Wyatt and wrapped him in my arms protectively. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I got you.”
Grasping my face in his little hands, he tipped my head to the side and whispered into my ear. “I’m still scared of the pirates.”
Obviously his mother’s fairytale explanation hadn’t been enough to ease his concerns, so it was time to explain professional courtesy to my preschooler in a way he could understand. “Listen up. The pirates won’t bother us because they like me.” I dropped my voice and looked around for spies. “I haven’t told you this before, Wyatt, but before I met your mommy, I was a pirate myself.”
“Really?” My boy stared up at me with eyes so wide and trusting I wanted to live in his magical world forever. Sure, it wasn’t the full truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But like my own dad had before me, I’d learned that I could feed little Wyatt a big boy plate of yummy old white lies and he’d eat up every last bite.
“Yep, I had the long hair, stinky clothes, dopey smile; the works.”
Kyle tipped his head back from the bench directly in front of us. “Back when your dad and I were kids, Wyatt, pirates were also known as stoners.”
Sam smacked him. “Do not bring that word into my son’s vocabulary. Don’t you have your own kids to parent?”
Smugly, Kyle hooked his arms behind his head. “I don’t have to. He parents me.”
And, sadly, he wasn’t kidding. I glanced over at Kyle and Kenzie’s firstborn son, who’d inexplicably been born a genius. Talk about a miracle of science. Little Arlo was already at a junior high school reading level, and he was only six. There was talk amongst the family that maybe the kid had somehow been switched at birth, but his resemblance to Kyle was too strong to make a legal case against the hospital. Somehow my younger brother and his Bigfoot-loving wife had sired a child with a Nobel Prize-level IQ.
I glanced over at Arlo, who’d been looking up at the vast darkness of the artificial dome ceiling that created the fantasy that was the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
“Dad,” Arlo finally spoke. I listened in, always enjoying the profound words that carefully exited his mouth. “How many years are there in a millennium?”
“Is this one of those questions you already know the answer to but you ask it just to make me look bad?”
He shrugged his little shoulders.
“Um, okay well.” Kyle scratched his head searching for an answer – always searching. “Like ten, maybe.”
“No,” he sighed. “That’s a decade.”
“Oh…huh. Really?”
“Yes. The correct answer is one thousand.”
Kyle tipped his head back again. “See what I’m saying? No need to parent.”
I reached up and manually turned my little brother’s head to something that did require his attention. “I was actually talking about that one.”
Our eyes both diverted to Kenzie trying desperately to pry their unruly three-year-old off a wheelchair he’d commandeered on his way into the boat.
“That’s not a ride, Axel,” Kenzie said, yanking on his little body while blowing the hair out of her exasperated eyes.
At least there was some justice in the world – a balancing act of sorts. It seemed all the dominant genes had been depleted making Arlo, leaving poor Axel with little more than the ability to wander around with a bucket on his head, ramming himself into walls.
“You gonna help with that?” I asked him, flicking my head in Kenzie’s direction.
“Nah, she’s got it.”
“Kyle!” Kenzie snapped, and he jumped to attention like he’d been pierced with a pirate’s sword. He was out of the boat before the exclamation point attached itself to the end of his name.
Yep, my siblings and I were learning that there were no Fast Passes in parenting.
There were, however, VIP tours for the rich and famous, and that’s where we were now, celebrating one of Dad’s birthday week days in the happiest place on Earth. Having the benefit of a celebrity in our ranks, we enjoyed certain privileges that most did not. Case in point: the temporary shut down of the pirate ride so our swelling group of twenty-six – twelve of which were children – could get into the waiting boats without sinking the wooden pier.
Mitch, sandwiched into the first bench between his wife, Kate, and their two kids, had to raise his arms to disengage from the crush of his family. His son Max insisted on sitting in the front row, which he called the splash zone, and because he was the oldest of the grandkids, all his worshipping cousins fell in line. Along with his sister, Madison, they were the stars of the show anytime they arrived for a family function. It was like Mitch déjà vu all over again… but now I embraced it. As I saw it, the more family I could surround myself with, the happier my life would be in the long run. So I embraced crazy situations like this, bobbing in a pirate boat while thousands of inconvenienced park-goers eagerly awaited my famous brother to make his move.
“Where are the others?” Mitch asked, glancing over in the direction we’d come from moments before getting on the ride. “I thought they were right behind us.”
