C’s fifth birthday is coming up soon, and he has been looking forward to it for quite a while. In fact, his little brother’s birthday was back in June, and C was talking about his own birthday even while we were planning that. For the most part, I must say, he has been good about not focussing on the presents.

One weekend in late May, however, he got a bit sneaky. We were visiting Nana and Grampa at the time, sitting down at their community pool. We had finished with swimming and were just sitting and talking when a couple of other kids arrived with their parents. They immediately brought out a couple of those huge super-soaker squirt guns and started having a squirt gun fight around the pool.

The kids were fascinated.

After a little while of watching, C walked over to stand by Nana’s knee. He rested his hand on her knee, stood there for a little bit, and then said “Wow. We’ve never seen those before!”

His little brother chimed in eagerly. “No, we haven’t!”

“They’re really cool.”

“Yeah!”

“We don’t have anything like that. Do we?”

“Nope.”

“Daddy, let’s go play!”

I went with them to play. Amazingly enough, one of the kids even shared her squirt gun (a dangerous thing to do). Seeing the four of them all playing together, I withdrew to the chairs.

Sure enough, Nana and Grampa arrived at N’s birthday with squirtguns for each of them.

Now why didn’t that ever work for me?