I Spy with My Little Eye
by
So it’s Super Bowl Sunday and the fam and I, as is our annual tradition, are chillin’ (more like boiling) in our friends’ hot tub before the big game.
Now, my wife, Boogieface, and I all understand and appreciate the true purpose of a hot tub: relaxation. The Animal, however, sees it as his very own private mini swimming pool and is flopping around the 6×6 tub like a lunatic sea otter.
In an effort to get him to sit still and quit splashing us in the face, I initiate a game of “I Spy,” selecting something I know will be almost impossible to find, just to keep the boy occupied and, most important, motionless for a few minutes.
After about five minutes of blissful non-movement on his part, my son chooses to give up the search so that he can take a turn at spying something.
“I spy with my little eye…” he says, “something…brown!”
Meanwhile the rest of us begin to fire out our guesses.
“The barn!”
“That tree!”
“The pile of wood over there!”
No, no, and no. Then, before we can guess again, my son interjects, “Wait, wait, wait. I’m not really sure what it is yet.”
“What do you mean you don’t know yet?” I ask. “How can you not know?”
“Well,” he says, “I was gonna pick a perticular branch on that tree way over there, but then I couldn’t decide which one, so I just decided to pick something else.”
By this time we’re all laughing, as my son tries again. “I spy with my little eye…something…blue!”
“The sky!”
“That cooler over there!”
“The bird house!”
Again, no, no, and no.
Says the boy, “It was that blue Ford F-150 we saw on the road on the way here.”
By this point I’m beginning to suspect he doesn’t understand the rules of the game. “How in the heck are we supposed to find something you saw a half an hour ago, miles down the road?”
The Animal, however, is undeterred. “Okay, okay,” he says. “I have another one.”
By this point we’re all pretty much done with the game. But the kid’s on a roll.
“Okay, I have something. But,” he adds, “it’s not in this world!”
“What do you mean?” says my wife, by this point crying with laughter. “Is it in another dimension or something?”
He continues. “And…it’s white!”
Then, before any of us can venture a guess, he asks us if we want to know what it is. Sure, why not?
“George Washington’s hair!”
Of course it is.
So we all laugh a little more and accept that the game is a bust. But, hey, it kept the kid still for a few minutes.
Thank heaven for small mercies. ~
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Copyright © 2017 Valentine J. Brkich