Wednesdays are early release days from school. Often when my oldest is getting home from kindergarten on Wednesdays at least one of the other 3 kids is still napping. The bus stop is just far enough away I don’t feel comfortable letting him walk home by himself yet and I feel awkward leaving a sleeping kid alone in the house. Thankfully my next door neighbor has a 1st grader and she will often walk our two boys back from the bus stop to help me out.

This most recent Wednesday it just so happened that when my oldest got home all 3 of the other kids were asleep, which is a rare thing.  My son, Cooper, walks in the door and barely said a word to me when he started taking off his shirt.  I questioned him about what he was doing and he mumbled something about being hot. It was one of those Florida days where the temperature was in the 40s when you wake up and by one o’clock it’s sunny and in the 70s.  You layer up in the morning and peel layers off as it warms up. He had finally taken off his last layer. He isn’t one who normally needs to take his clothes off so I though it was a bit odd but nothing so crazy. I told him to put his back pack away and I went back to finish up whatever it was I happened to be doing at the time. Probably piddling with my blog.

As he was putting his backpack away he had the realization that none of the other kids were around. He called out and asked me where everyone was. I told him they were all asleep. Whenever it is just him and me he likes to take advantage of the opportunity to play games which we otherwise can’t play with the little ones running around knocking the pieces over such as chess, checkers or dominoes. He quickly asked if we could play one of those games before everyone woke up.  I told him we could and I’d be there in just a moment. We keep the games up on a high shelf in the closet where he cannot reach and he began to get impatient with me and asked me to hurry up. I assured him I would be there quickly. Another moment passed and his 5 year old self could not remain patient any longer. He quickly thought of something that he was sure would get me up and running over to him as fast as possible.

He called out:

“If you don’t get over here soon, I’m going to take my pants off!”

I don’t know why he decided to yell that or actually how serious he was about stripping off his pants but it was odd enough that it got my attention and had me laughing over to the games closet. We enjoyed a little bit of rare one on one time and everyone kept their pants on!