Tag: Lil’B

Busy Stay-Cation

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

I usually make the excuse that I write at work because I’m there so much and I have no time for writing at home…  That sounds nice, but since I’ve been off work since December 23rd and I didn’t write a thing between December 22nd and really, yesterday, that’s not much of an excuse.  You’d think there would have been many blog posts during this stay-cation.

This has been one of the best vacations I’ve had in a while, I mean, you know, for not having gone anywhere.  I received an infusion of cash (insurance reimbursement for my therapy bills) just as this stay-cation was beginning which enabled me to comfortably purchase Christmas gifts for all the people on my list to buy gifts for; fancy coffee for my mother, A GPS for Michelle, an Afterglow PS3 controller for Lil’B as well as art supplies for his birthday (which is 12/31), a cordless drill for my oldest niece (this is what she wanted.  Don’t judge me.), a horse game for my second niece and a little plush, radio control fire truck for my nephew.  Everything arrived on time and was properly distributed.  As far as I know everyone appreciated their gifts.  I was concerned that the art supplies would pale in Lil’B’s eyes compared to the controller, but he said he was excited about the art supplies.

I have spent a lot of time at home during this stay-cation, which is fine ’cause it was kind of the plan.  Stay home, clean, organize, generally get things in better shape.  I haven’t accomplished nearly as much as I had hoped I would, but I’ve gotten a lot done and I’m quite happy about hat.  One of my Christmas gifts to myself is something I’ve wanted for a long time but just didn’t convince myself to spend the money on.  I decided recently that I was determined to get the item and so when I got the cash infusion, I took my 20% off coupon and headed right out to Bed, Bath and Beyond where I bought a Roomba, robot vacuum cleaner.

You guys! I’m so glad I bought this thing and I wish I had gotten it a long time ago!  It’s awesome!  It does a very effective job and it requires almost no effort on my part.  I say almost, because I do have to empty the little bin pretty much every day and I do have to push the button to turn it on…  Well I don’t have to.  There is an auto start feature, I just haven’t enabled it.  I also have to make sure there is nothing on the floor to get in its way.  This thing is surprisingly assertive and I have found that I have to make sure that all cords and cables are well out of the way or it will run over them and cause problems.  Though it is smart enough to stop running before it gets too tangled up in something, it will try a bit to vacuum the thing up, before it gives up.  My biggest fear was that it would not be able to get over the lip into the kitchen, which is the messiest room because that’s where the cat litter is, but the Roomba jumps the curb like it’s no big deal.  The other concern I had was how Mischa would react to it.  He has always been afraid of vacuum cleaners and whenever I would turn one on, he would run and hide behind a chair or something.  He doesn’t seem overly concerned about the Roomba which is louder than I had hoped, but far and away quieter than any manual powered vacuum I’ve ever owned.  What’s really funny is that the Roomba, which has a built-in extra-dirt-detection sensor, seems to identify Mischa as a pile of extra dirt and it routinely targets him and heads straight toward him.  Mischa, being the mental giant that he is, just stands there until the Roomba actually bumps into him and then he acts indignant that it came after him.  Roomba has a little side brush which is designed to brush debris away from walls and out into it’s path.  Sometimes this side brush will bump against Mischa’s feet and then he tries to pounce on the brushes.  It’s really quite funny.  But I can run the Roomba everyday without causing any great turmoil for Mischa and that’s what I wanted, so I’m really quite thrilled with my purchase and wish I had done it long ago!  Now I really want a Scooba.  It’s made by the same people and it’s designed to wash hard floors.  The problem is, it says it’s safe on “sealed hardwood floors” and I’m sure mine is not sealed.  Bummer!

 

Michelle had a “lounge” party, on Christmas Eve at her apartment.  She insists it was always a lounge party (wear lounge pants and t-shirts) but her sister kept calling it a pajama party and I swear Michelle called it a pajama party the first time she mentioned it to me.  I pointed out that I don’t wear pajamas and that no one wants to see that, and that’s when she started calling it a “lounge” party.  It was a nice time.  Her three-year-old great-nephew was there and Michelle handed him my Christmas present and asked him to bring it to me.  Somehow, between that time and the time he handed it to me, the paper… ahem… fell off the gift.  She gave me a heated mattress pad, which is something I had been wanting for a while, only, you know how when you build something up in your mind and it’s going to be so wonderful and then you actually get the thing and it can’t live up to the expectations you built…  Yeah, that.  I felt badly ’cause I want to take it back, but I didn’t want to hurt Michelle’s feelings.  When I got over to her house this past Friday to do my laundry (since Saturday was New Year’s Eve) she was in the process of repackaging the one she had bought for herself to take it back.  She didn’t like it.  She let me off the hook and told me that I could return the one she got me if I wanted.  I told her I would probably do that and that I’d bring it back to her (since she had the receipt) and she could take it back and get me something else and wrap it up for me, and then maybe I’ll get to open MY OWN Christmas present.

 

I took Lil’B to Benihana for his Birthday dinner…  Actually it was kind of confusing. I took him, on December 26th and I told him, this is a special dinner to celebrate his Birthday, where he will get his Christmas present, and then at the next dinner on January 2nd, he would get his Birthday present.  I hadn’t been to  a Benihana in many years and while I knew it was a lot of fun, I also thought I remembered that it was a long and drawn out affair so I made reservations for 5:00.  He was out of school so it wasn’t a school night, but I figured we shouldn’t be out too late.  Dinner was over at 6:50 and Lil’B didn’t want to go home yet.  I called his mother and got her blessing and we went to a movie after dinner.  I got to take him to one of my favorite Movie Theaters.  It’s just and AMC theater, but it’s in the middle of San Francisco and it’s in an old building they renovated.  It’s a 12 screen cinema, but there are only four theaters to a floor, and there are three levels of theaters.  Since they are stadium seating, each theater is two stories, so this building is about 8 stories tall and I just find it fascinating.

We saw Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.  This movie was horrendous!  I mean, truly, truly, terrible!  Now I know, this movie is not geared toward my age group, but I thoroughly enjoyed the first two so it was sadly disappointing to me that I didn’t like this one as much, but on the plus side, there was a moment in this wretched movie that actually made Lil’B laugh out loud and if you’ve been coming around here long, you know what an accomplishment that is.  I’d sit through it again just to hear that!

The next day, I went to therapy, did a little shopping and went over to hang out with my friend Karin and her two kids.  I ended up staying through dinner and had a nice time.  She introduced me to some fancy operations that my iPhone is capable of and I wasn’t even aware… Giving me pause to consider the value in some new equipment purchases.  I’ll have to give that some thought.

 

Friday I went to Michelle’s house to do my laundry and hang out.  I got there early and after I started my first load, she and her great-nephew and I went to breakfast.  The boy was quite rambunctious and energetic.  It was fun though.  He runs kind of hot and cold when it comes to me, well, anyway, hot and luke warm.  Apparently, since he was a baby baby, I’m the only male, outside his immediate family that he would let hold him.  Other men would pick him up and he’d immediately squirm and cry and want to get away and with me, he was fine.  Now that he’s a little older and has a personality, he doesn’t dislike me, but he often doesn’t want to engage with me.  But this day, as soon as I walked in he was all over me, asking me questions and talking to me and wanting to sit with me.  It was almost too much, but it was still nice to see.

 

I’ve mentioned in the past how I do not want to be home on New Year’s Eve.  My mother never went anywhere or did anything and all we ever did was sat in the living room and watch TV.  Theoretically, watching “the ball drop” only my mother was forever surfing channels trying to get away from all that horrible secular music that was always on the network shows.  We would watch something from Washington, DC on PBS, which was always live and therefore an hour early, plus fireworks on TV just do not have the same effect.  From 11:00 to 11:58:30 she would surf around trying to find something that wasn’t rock and roll music and then at the last second (sometimes after the last second) turn the TV to one of the networks.  We’d say “happy new year” and then go to bed.  I swore that when I had it in my own power I was not just going to sit around at home on New Year’s Eve.  This has proven to be problematic from time to time because I hate crowds too, but I make the best of it.

In years past I’ve gone out of town for New Year’s Eve spending a few days in another place away from home and with more excitement than I’ve got here.  Most of the time, New Year’s Eve was just the excuse I needed to go on a trip, but I still enjoyed myself.  I’ve been to Las Vegas a couple of times, Los Angeles a couple of times, Reno a couple of times.  Last year we got a room a the Embarcadero Hilton in San Francisco and had a really lovely evening, but it ended up costing as much as a three night trip out of town.  This year, Michelle and I had 10:00 reservations at a restaurant called Skates on the Bay, which is, as you might imagine, on the San Francisco Bay.  I had never been, though Michelle had a couple of times.  The plan was to have dinner and then stroll out side to the water front where we would watch the fireworks from San Francisco at midnight.  In an all too familiar scene, Michelle was in the bathroom at midnight and I stood by the windows of the restaurant where we had JUST gotten our check and watched the fireworks by myself (le sigh).  It’s okay.  This is kind of terrible for me to say, but I feel like midnight on New Year’s Eve is a moment that, ideally should be shared romantically and I don’t have any romantic feelings for Michelle, maybe being alone at that moment was better.  The fire works display was nice, though I feel like it looses some of its splendor when you can’t hear, and just as importantly, feel them.  The display was the same one we watched last year, which means it was shot off from a barge outside the San Francisco Ferry Building, about six and a half miles away.  I’m always caught a little by surprise at how small they are from what seems like such a short distance.

After dinner, I took Michelle back to her sister’s house, dropped her off and came home.  I would have liked to have been somewhere else for a little vacation and I got a wild idea that may not really be financially feasible that I’d really like to go to Australia for next New Year’s Eve, but as long as my 19 1/2 year old cat is with me, that can’t happen.

Last night was another dinner with Lil’B.  We went to a local place I’d never been to called The South Shore Cafe.  It was very ordinary, but it was something new for both of us and I’m trying to expose him to new things, so it was fun.  We talked a little bit about his birthday.  He said he couldn’t remember what kind of cake he had but that it had Oreos on it.  I asked him if they had ice cream and he said no, so I had to rectify the no birthday ice cream problem.  We went to a local ice cream shop called Loard’s (I learned it is supposed to be pronounced “Lo-ard’s” as it is a compilation of the two founders last names.)  Loard’s is a 100% local company that makes its own ice cream in a local factory and it was really quite good.  When I was looking at the flavors on the board I was caught by surprise and was a little grossed out by “Avocado flavor” but I had to taste it.  It was surprisingly good, although, honestly, it tasted mostly like Vanilla.

 

This morning I had an orthodontist appointment, I wasn’t holding my breath, though I was hoping today would be the big day.  No such luck.  In fact based on the conversation I had today with “Dr. Jeff”, (I always wondered how the staff differentiated between the father and the son, now I know) it looks like two to three more months.  The day Dr. Jeff put them on he told me 12-18 months, this is the 13th month.  On the plus side though, I paid my final payment today and have one few debts hanging over my head! Yay!

 

Tonight I have dinner with an old friend of mine, and tomorrow Michelle and I are going, over-night, to Cache Creek Casino and Resort.  It’s an Indian run casino about 90 minutes north of here.  We’ll go and play for the afternoon, then spend the night in a hotel room, have breakfast and head back.  That’s about as long as I can leave Mischa on his own since he’s confined to the cage and he eats canned food, but it’ll be nice to get a little tiny break anyway.

 

*Oh by the way, I guess I’m supposed to say that despite my glowing report (and despite the two additional people I’ve about talked into it – my mother says I should get a commisison) I am not being compensated in anyway by Roomba, or Bed Bath and Beyond or any other products or merchants I may have mentioned here…  Dammit.

This Is Not the Post You Are (Probably) Looking For

~ riggledo ~ 8 Comments

…Though that will come sooner or later…

This post is about hanging out with Lil’B.  I’ve amended our hanging out schedule a little bit and now, I see him every other Sunday afternoon and on the week that I don’t see him on Sunday, we’re going to have dinner on that Monday night.  I have been aware that our every other weekend schedule has been insufficient for him.  I could tell that he wanted more, I’ve just been slow in making that happen.

Last night was our first Monday dinner and I could tell when I picked him up he was excited about it.  He was all smiles and he even dressed up… in fact, I found out later, he dressed up more than I thought.  He borrowed a pair of black fabric tennis shoes from his 19-year-old sister “because all [his] shoes were dirty.”  (Fortunately, they didn’t look particularly like girls shoes.  Amazingly, they fit him perfectly, his toes right where they should have been.)

I was a little bit unprepared so we went to dinner at Applebee’s in Alameda, not too far from our houses.  I plan to take him to all kinds of fun places and explore our neighborhoods and the ones around us.  I want to try to balance exposing him to the neighborhood he lives in with lots of his own culture (he lives in what could be referred to as Little Mexico), but also get him out of the neighborhood and show him other walks of life.  Basically, I want to teach him not to be ashamed of where he comes from, but that there is more to the world and to life than what he sees now.

When I picked him up, I asked him if he had any homework we should bring with us and take a look at.  He happily pulled his math homework (something he doesn’t need any help with) out of his backpack and brought it with us.  In the car I asked him the usual questions:

“How was school?”

“Good.”

“What’d you study?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’d you have for lunch?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Did you have an afternoon snack?”

“No.”

“Hmmm.  Well, we’ll see how hungry you are when there’s a menu in front of you.”

He’d never been to an Applebees and he thought it was pretty cool.  He was especially impressed with the fact that the waitress brought him a second Pepsi when his first one was gone, even though no one asked for it.  (I think that’s pretty cool too, but probably for different reasons.)

They fold the kids menu into a little packet with four crayons inside it, which Lil’B thought was pretty cool and he enjoyed the games on it.  He ordered Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese, which was a pretty neet racket, since they charged me $4.99 for what amounted to about a quarter (if that) of a box of Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese which you can purchase at the store for about a buck fifty, but whatever.

When we finished dinner, he gathered his things so we could leave.  He had his homework packet, a pencil and his menu (which he had folded back up into a packet and tucked the crayons away).  He took about three steps and dropped his homework.  He stooped to pick it up and took a couple more steps before he dropped his pencil.  He stopped and picked it up and took a couple more steps and before he dropped the menu packet.  As he stooped and picked that up, I chucked congenially and as I joked, “got anything else you wanna drop?”, I gesticulated wildly, and a ring flew off my right ring finger and hit the wall in front of him.  I’m pretty sure he didn’t catch the irony in that, but I thought it was pretty funny!

We talked about Halloween.  He’s really looking forward to trick or treating and getting lots of candy!  He told me that this year his school instituted a rule for costumes that they can not include weapons and they can’t include blood (too scary for the kindergarteners) so that really reduces his options for costumes.  He said he thought he might be a soccer player.   I was pretty happy with that since last year he was a monster and the year before that he was the killer from Scream that had a pump that made fake blood run down the face.  (Later his older sister told me he was probably going to be a zombie soccer player.  I’m less impressed.)

In the course of that conversation he told me he had never had candy corn.  How is that possible?  At almost ten years old, he’s never had candy corn?!?  I had to correct that post haste, and fortunately, there was a Walgreens in the same parking lot with the Applebee’s.

When we walked into Walgreens they had a display of Halloween decorations, including a Scream guy with a knife in his hand.  You press a button and it lights up, makes a noise and the knife comes at you.  Lil’B pressed the button and jumped when it lurched toward him.  For all his talk about monsters and zombies and stuff, I thought that was pretty funny.

All in all, he seemed to have a really good time, as did I.  The outing seems to have been a great success, which is really good, because I just realized, this may be the most boring blog post I’ve ever written….

Garbage Smell Gets A Laugh

~ riggledo ~ 1 Comment

As you might have guessed, I saw The Smurfs with Lil’B this weekend.  I love having a “little brother” because it gives me an excuse to go see all the kids movies I want to see anyway, but my friends won’t go to with me, without looking like a pervert or predator.  I told Lil’B not to grow up… And then immediately kicked myself because my mother used to say things like that to me all the time and I HATED IT.  (Actually, what I told him was never to get older than 12 because then his ticket price goes up.)

The last time I saw Lil’B we talked about what we would do this time around and I mentioned the movies.  There are a lot of movies out that look good and that I want to see, but I don’t get to the movies that often.  Lil’B has wanted to see Transformers 3, which I saw several weeks ago with Michelle.  It was good and I don’t think it would be a problem for him to see it, but there are a few whole sections in the movie (as with so many these days) where they play pretty fast and loose with incidental human life.  Many, many innocent bystanders would have been hurt or killed if there was an ounce of reality to the scenes on the screen.

Anyway, he had mentioned that he still wanted to see it and I suggested that we could go on our next outing (this past Sunday) if it was still out.  He seemed happy with that.  So when I picked him up on Sunday I told him, “You have three choices.  We can go see Transformers, The Smurfs or Captain America.”  (I was hoping he’d pick Captain America but I’d be happy to see any of the three movies.)  Before I even finished saying “Captain America” he was saying “The Smurfs!”  He was very excited.

Yay!  You really are still a kid! I thought.  Which, of course he is.  He’s only 9, but I’m aware that we’ll be coming up on a time, very soon, when he will be in that awkward, in between stage, where he’s still a kid, but kind of not.  I am, in equal parts, looking forward to and dreading that time.

He watched the movie in his usual position (with his head buried in his Icee cup), but no longer with the seat trying to swallow him alive – when did that stop?- and while he was busy slurping away on his Icee, I was thoroughly engrossed in the movie, laughing at all the lame and corny jokes…  Well, almost all of them.  When Tim Gunn, playing Henri, a character whose purpose I still don’t understand said to Neil Patrick Harris’s character, “Make it work”, I groaned.  And when Smurfette, voiced by Katie Perry, suggested a marketing slogan to NPH, “I kissed a smurf and I liked it?”, my palm may, possibly, have met my forehead.  What was kind of fun, for me, was that the mom two seats down from me, seeing the movie with three kids lil’er than Lil’B, and I kept laughing at all the same places.  This movie is full of grown up jokes, which is a sign of a well thought out movie.  Unfortunately, it also tends to prompt lil voices to ask, “What happened mommy?  Mommy, what happened?  Mommy?  Mommy?”

Off. Track.

As I was saying, while Lil’B was buried ears deep in his Icee, I was laughing at all the jokes and puns and visual comedy and so it was all the more gratifying to me, when in the scene when Gargamel, or as Sofia Vergara’s character calls him, “Garbage Smell”, get’s his due, Lil’B actually laughed out loud!

There’s hope for this kid after all!

Son

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

Two years ago, when I was contemplating becoming a Big Brother, I was looking for an opportunity to do something of value in the community.  I wanted to do something that would make a difference.  I wanted to do something that was ongoing, not just a one time deal to make myself feel better and then move on.

I suspect I wanted to fill a void in my life that can not be easily filled through more “natural” means, yet not fill it so much as to take on a 100%, full-time commitment that maybe I can’t afford to take on.  I liked the idea of having the opportunity to influence a young person and, hopefully, make a positive difference in his life.  The thought may have crossed my mind, once or twice, that I might be able to “save” a troubled kid; help him to find a better way to live.  Maybe I wanted someone to idolize me, perhaps to aspire to be like me, though I really hoped to give him more to aspire to than I have done.

There have been times, more than a few in fact, where I felt like none of that was happening.  Lil’B is a good kid with no problems to speak of.  (I hope he stays that way, but he’s only nine.)  With the exception of one outing when he was seven, the first day after Halloween, when he’d had much too much candy for breakfast, he’s never misbehaved and he accepts the limitations I place on him (that his mother has requested) without any trouble.  When we go to the movies and we go to the concession stand, when the cashier asks us if we want anything else, I see him point at the candy in the display case.  I laugh, tell him no and tell the cashier that our order is complete.  Lil’B laughs and we go on about our day.  (Mom doesn’t want him to have very much candy because he misbehaves if he gets too much sugar in his system.)  An occasional piece of candy, every once in a while is allowed, but not all the time.  He knows this and doesn’t get upset when I tell him no.

I’ve tried to enquire about deeper issues.  Is he hurting about anything?  Is there anything that’s bothering him that he wants to talk about?  But of course you have to be subtle about such things, you can’t come right out and ask.  He always tells me he’s fine.  He doesn’t talk a lot.  As often as not, I ask him a pointed question (i.e. What did you learn about in school this week?  What did you have for lunch today?) and he answers with “I don’t know.”  I feel bad when we’re driving down the road in silence, but I’ve run through my list of questions to ask him and he’s answered “I don’t know” to all of them, so, in silence we drive.

There have been times when I felt like maybe this relationship wasn’t serving any purpose after all.  I wanted to make a difference in his life, but maybe I’m not.  I wanted to feel warm and fuzzy, knowing that I was important to him, but I don’t.  I thoroughly enjoy the time we spend together, but some weeks I feel like I’m going because I’m supposed to, not because I want to.  I feel badly about that, and I hope he doesn’t see it.

Sunday afternoon was my regularly scheduled time with Lil’B.  Neither of us really knew what we wanted to do.  Our last few outings have been movies, which are always fun, but I – and I hope he – likes to do other things besides sitting around in a cold, dark room not talking to each other, sometimes.

I showed up at his house right around 2:00, our usual time and while he was finishing getting ready his mother called out to him in Spanish; something about “la escuela.”  He still has one week left of school, but he already has his report card and she wanted to show it to me.

He did very well in school.  They had three terms and for each term they were assigned a numeric score; not an average, a number.  I didn’t memorize the meanings of the numbers but essentially a 3 was average, or meeting the standard.  A 4 was proficient in the particular skill.  I’m not sure how those numbers relate to the letter grades and percentages out of 100 that I remember getting, but whatever.

For the first two terms he got 3s for both reading and writing, but then in the third term he got 4s.  This is a bi-lingual school.  So he was rated proficient reading and writing both English and Spanish.  For the other subjects, Science and Math (and it seems like there was one more) he had gotten 4s throughout the entire year.

Lil’B’s mother told me she was very happy that he had gotten such good scores; both Lil’B’s older brother and younger sister got good scores as well.  Then she told me that the day he brought the report card home he was very excited and he told her, “Be sure to show this to my Big Brother!” (Warm)

I told him I was very proud, and I am.  He’s worked hard this year.  In the second grade we had to bring his homework with us sometimes and spend some time on that and he didn’t much like having to do that.  In the third grade there was an after school program that he was in and he had time to do his homework there.  He got his homework packets done every week in the after school program and, we are told, he even helped the other students with their homework (particularly the math, yech!)

We decided to go Miniature Golfing for our outing which was a lot of fun, except that I don’t know where my sunscreen is and I was wearing short sleeve’s, shorts and flip-flops.  I now have some very oddly laid out sunburn.

It’s the end of the school year for a lot of students.  It was also the first really nice day we’ve had so far this summer.  Mother Nature seems to have forgotten that this here is California, land of sun and fun; also that it is mid-JUNE and we like to not have to wear coats this time of year.  Naturally, the mini-golf place was very busy and there was a back log of parties on the course.

Lil’B and I got stuck behind a party of six, spanning in ages from “Grandma” all the way down to “Little Lexie” who was “not quite three and doing surprisingly well” (if you count carrying your ball over to within two inches of the hole and then using the narrow end of the club head and a double ham-fisted grip to hit it toward the hole – and still missing half the time).  Clearly a completely unbiased opinion from Grandma.  I opted not to get mad, because as much as it’s no fun to sit around and wait, I don’t like to feel rushed either and the party of six was every bit as entitled to enjoy their time in the sun as Lil’B and I, and all the people behind us.

So Lil’B and I would play our hole and we’d move ahead to wait for the next one after “Little Lexie” finished making her play.  Since we were only two, and they were six, there was a lot of time waiting between rounds.  We’d finish playing, move to the next hole and sit on one of the many benches around (Well, I sat.  Lil’B usually didn’t.)  When we were finished, the family behind us, two little boys – probably close to Lil’B’s age – and their two young parents, would play.  It seemed that only the boys were playing.  Mom was there to keep score, and I would guess, dad was the money.  (Actually, mom and dad may have been on a date.  At one point I heard one of the boys say, now I want to try this hole with my mom.  I would only be guessing to say what that meant.)

It was around the tenth hole, when I was sitting on the bench waiting for Little Lexie to finish her play and the family behind us finished their round on hole number nine.  I scooted down to the end of the bench and the two little boys sat down next to me.  Just then Little Lexie moved on and Lil’B stepped up to take his shot.  I guess the family behind us had been watching us closely because when Lil’B took his shot and his ball stopped fairly close to the hole, one of the little boys looked at me and said, “Your son is pretty good.”  (aaaand fuzzy)

I didn’t correct him.  It seemed like it would be unkind to point out an error he couldn’t have known he’d made.  Besides, “I’m not his dad, I’m his Big Brother” is no explanation at all, since you can’t see the capital Bs when you talk.  I think we all know by now, Lil’B is mexican…  I?  I glow in the dark.  Clearly we do not share any blood, so we can’t be brothers… unless one of us is adopted I suppose.

I simply answered, “He gets a lot more practice than I do.”  And from then on we were all chatting together and having fun together.  It may have become apparent later that maybe I wasn’t his father when I talked to Lil’B about our outings, but nobody questioned it.

And I realized something.  I would be proud to be his father.  Maybe someday I’ll get the chance to be a father, but if I don’t, at least I’ll have had this time with my Little Brother, and that’s pretty special, too!