The Gentleman bug

I was on the phone with my daughter when my granddaughter excitedly intervened to advise me of the ladybugs she had spotted in the house. "Were there any gentleman bugs", I inquired. To which my daughter responded, "You don't need to make bad dad jokes so early in the morning." And my granddaughter gratuitously added "Papa is always getting things wrong." 

Out of the mouth of babes.

You see the role in my relationship with her is to play the fool, a part with which I am far too intimately familiar.

Like when we pick her up after school twice a week and each time she appears I ask "What are you doing here?" As my wife often advises me "you need new material." Unfortunately, I am not that clever.

Or if my granddaughter is snacking on something delicious and I virtually beg "can you share some with me", her inevitable reply is to provide me with a morsel too small for the human eye to capture. Which I then devour and declare myself fully satiated. 

It is the essence of our to and fro. I know that in short order she will outgrow the shenanigans of the old guy trying to be funny by being more than a few brain cells short. My humor, and my mental function, very well suited to a 4 year old, but surely inadequate to keep up with the mandates of one when pre-school is in the rear view mirror.

But until that day arrives I will continue to thoroughly enjoy being told to enter a windowless bathroom, turn out the lights, shut my eyes and then wonder in a high pitched whine why I can't see anything and can't locate the door handle to gain my freedom.

A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but when the mind is mine, I am exhausting every single firing neuron I've got with my "gentleman bug" masterpiece.

Don't say it. I know..