The Price of Cool

My kids are cool. My two-year old daughter is a fashion designer. Who would have thought to use band-aids to turn a plain shirt into a striped shirt and use head bands to make a colorful neck-warmer? My four-year old son used his preschool hard-work bucks to get a pirate eye patch from the prize box, which he then wore to all of the apartment complexes we visited in the afternoon. He also rolled on the carpet of each apartment we viewed to test out its wrestle-ability. And of course, our baby girl is cool too. Whenever I lay on the floor she's sure to body slam me within minutes of doing so. They also wrestle with each other, and the girls run to hug their older brother when he gets home from school. That is cool. I'd like to take some credit for how cool they are. But being cool has its price. Being cool to little kids means fatigue. If I lift them or swing them in some fun way, it means I must do it over and over and over again in an attempt to quell the continuous, "Do it again Daddy! Again! Again!" For me, the quell is multiplied by three kids and includes a great deal of cutting in line and arguing over who's next. Unfortunately, I cannot quell the demand. It becomes infinitely more exciting each time it is repeated and trying to stop for dinner or bed results in the same kind of screaming you might hear during a medieval amputation procedure. I am hot and sweaty. If being cool doesn't result in fatigue, it results in a mess. We are staying with family while searching for an apartment, and in an attempt to encourage the kids from both families to eat their dinner, I told them that their brains grow bigger with each bite. So they began with little bites, asking me after each bite to look into their ears and see if their brains got bigger. It was fun at first, so I attempted to get them to take bigger bites by telling them that the brain grows only a little bit with little bites but a lot with big bites. Soon, spoonfuls of spaghetti were plopping onto the ground as little hands held their spoons high in the air in failed attempts to show me the big bites of dinner they were about to eat. I promptly apologized to my cousin for the mess and explained my good intentions. Alas, hot on the heels of the mess were little voices chanting, "Again! Again! Again!"