Snapshots from Parenting: The Boy and the Bible

First, one really cute thing Owen does before I get into the meat of what I want to say. Owen is simultaneously a human boy of nearly the age of three, a big giraffe, a small robin, and a small bear. Giraffes are his favorite animal, robins his favorite bird, and I have called him Bear since the day he was born so that one is more default. There was a new animal added to the menagerie this week: a baby fox. Clara was changing him for bed and he made a slight whimpering sound and then tucked his head down into her and rubbed it back and forth. When she asked him what in the world he was doing he told her he was a baby fox. His name is Harold when he is a baby fox. He keeps a baby fox den beside our bed with two of our throw pillows and an assortment of his blankets. (This is quite similar, structurally, to his robin’s nest that he builds on the floor at various times. I am overlooking his lack of architectural imagination.) Now, onto the other story. . .  

Owen, like most young sons, emulates nearly everything that I do. For better or worse, of course. He parrots my mannerisms, expressions, language. He is learning to process the world and his emotions through the way I engage the world and my own emotions. It is very convicting stuff. And the snapshot I share in this post is not meant at all to puff up my own estimation of my success at showing him Christlikeness. I fail constantly. This post is to glorify God for the way he makes up for what we lack.

The other night we were at our weekly Bible study and I was leading a conversation on family. We were discussing how it is the task of parents to shape the affections of our children, not just their minds. Clara and I are the only parents in the group, and we were expressing some mild exasperation in the day-to-day specifics of putting Christ at the center of our home. With a three year-old (almost) and a one year-old (almost) we can wonder if anything we are doing with our kids—reading the Book of Common Prayer at mealtimes, singing hymns, praying as a family—are really making any difference at all, if there is any way they are getting through to our kids and shaping their affections and desires.

Just as we are having this conversation, Owen, who had been playing in the living room came up and asked Clara for a Bible. She didn’t have one in the diaper bag and he got really sad. She told him to pretend that “Is Your Mama a Llama?” was a Bible (heresy!). He assented, grabbed the book, and came and sat next to me at the kitchen table. He interrupted our conversation to tell the whole group his routine:

“First, I read the Bible. Then I sing a song, like ‘Oh, How He Loves Us.’ Then I pray.”

It was a simple moment, but it was so touching for us. He wanted to insert himself into our conversation. He sat beside me for the rest of the time, mimicking my hand motions and agreeing with another group member whenever I did.

But it showed me that God’s power manifests not when we are perfect and have everything neatly ironed out, but when in our weakness we try to be more like him. 

Snapshot from Parenting: A Toddler Gardens

The other night I was watching the kids while Clara worked. Ellie was taking a nap and Owen and I were outside playing. Owen is a worker, just like his mom. We spent a chunk of time in the front yard where he was mowing with his lawnmower. He chastised me for not mowing, but in my defense I had mowed the night before with my lawnmower. Though I don't mind looking the fool for my kids, pushing a lawnmower around my front yard without turning on the engine to amuse my son is just a bit too far. After mowing to his satisfaction he went through our yard and picked up all of the sticks to put in a wood chipper (he hands them to me and I make a buzzing noise). From there we moved to the backyard.

"Will you rake with me daddy?"

"Sure, buddy, let me go check on your sister first."

I went upstairs and Ellie was awake so I grabbed her and headed back down. When we got to the backyard Owen was working with his rake up close to the house in a spot that sees no sun throughout the year and therefore has no grass. He was raking the loose dirt into a pile and had grabbed his wagon and shovel out of the shed. I had watched him maneuver it out from the upstairs window. He then set about scooping up the pile he had raked and putting the dirt into his wagon. Ellie and I sat in the yard to watch. 

He steered the wagon over to the swingset and began unloading the dirt beneath the slide area. It was 95 degrees that day, and humid. The sun was beating down and his entire head was soaked with sweat. After he stopped getting enough dirt in a shovel scoop to justify the use of the tool he reached with both hands and grabbed loose dirt and tossed it into his new pile.

Of all the innocuous moments of parenting, moments that bleed into one another and are quickly forgotten, there was something about this one that I wanted to cling to. This image of my nearly three-year old son glistening with sweat in the early summer sun grabbing fistfuls of dirt and throwing them under a swingset. The sun on his face, the dirt accumulating all over his body, sticking fast to the sweat. The simple, dexterous movements. The confidence in his abilities. The total focus on a (for an outsider) completely silly task. My son's whole body and mind were devoted to this act. He could not have been more content anywhere in the world. He craned his fingers into every nook and cranny of that wagon until he was satisfied that he had scraped free everything he could. Then he turned the wagon on its side and dumped what was left into his pile.

I didn't have the heart to tell him he could have saved himself some time and a mess if he had only started with that move. He'll figure stuff like that out when he gets older. But I am in no rush. I could watch my son empty dirt from a wagon for hours.

A Brief Glimpse at Christianity Through the Eyes of a Two-Year Old

Psalm 8.2: "Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger."

Jesus also quoted this passage towards the end of Matthew's gospel, though he changes "strength" to "praise."

This morning Clara worked so I was pulling double duty getting Owen and Eleanor ready for the day. I had them both dressed and went downstairs to start the car to let it heat up a bit before I took them to their friends' house to play for the day. I asked Owen to watch his sister. I came back upstairs and he had not heard me. This is what I overheard:

[Owen, reading from a Valentine's Day card from Papa and Granma]: "Jesus is so good. And he's here. And he's always happy. Amen. Now, let's sing a song."

[Owen, grabbing my old racquetball racket that doubles as a guitar and standing on the bench we use in the bathroom to help him brush his teeth which he had dragged into the bedroom. Elie, staring at him fixedly.] (Singing) "God is so good. God is so good. God is so good." [Pause] (Normal voice): Amen. Now let's pray. 

[Owen descends from the bench, begins prayer. Elie, still fixated, one leg of a stuffed giraffe in her mouth.] "God, we love you. Thank you that you are here." [Pause] "Thank you that you are here." [Taking a Nietzchean turn] "Thank you that you are dead." [Returning to orthodoxy] "Thank you that you are alive again. Thank you for your smation (ed. note, "creation"). Amen."

[Authorial figure enters the room] "Son, that was beautiful."

Owen: "Daddy, I was singing to Elie. Sit down. I sing you a song."

[Remounts red bench, holds guitar flat.] "I'm playing slide guitar. Now let's sing." (Singing) "He loves us, oh he loves us. He loves us. He is good. And happy." (Normal voice) "Amen. Let's pray."

[This same process, and nearly same prayer repeats three times. The car is excessively hot and the author is late for work.]

Ghosts Trying to Hold the World

Any parent in the world will easily relate to the following:

"Parents in love with their kids are all amnesiacs, trying to remember, trying to cherish moments, ghosts trying to hold the world. Being mortals, having a finite mind when surrounded by joy that is perpetually rolling back into the rear view is like always having something important on the tips of our tongues, something on the tips of our fingers, always slipping away, always ducking our embrace.

No matter how many pictures we take, no matter how many scrapbooks we make, no matter how many moments we invade with a rolling camera, we will die. We will vanish. We cannot grab and hold. We cannot smuggle things out with us through death. . .

But this shouldn’t inspire melancholy; it should only tinge the sweet with the bitter. Don’t resent the moments simply because they cannot be frozen. Taste them. Savor them. Give thanks for that daily bread. Manna doesn’t keep overnight. More will come in the morning."

N.D. Wilson, Death by Living (107)

I constantly find myself trying to capture moments with Owen and Eleanor. Trying to remember the first time they did this or that thing (the feeling is more intense with Owen since he is older and therefore more active). Yesterday in the afternoon I was putting my shoes on to go out to the backyard and play with him. He already had his shoes on so he ran out back without me. I was watching through the open back door and he took off running after our chickens who had escaped their enclosure. When we first moved into this house and took over care of the chickens he loved to chase them across the yard. He had this sort of manic glee in his laugh as he chased them up and down the yard. It was cute, but not good. Poor girls get flustered easily. I was about to holler at him to stop when I realized what he was doing. He wasn’t chasing them arbitrarily for some sort of sadistic pleasure; he was putting them back in their enclosure. Just like daddy does. He had his arms out to try and corral them and ran down each one and forced them back to the fenced-in area. He shut the gate and grabbed the brick that we prop against it to keep it shut. By the time I got outside the job was done and he was standing proudly asking to play football. He wanted us to have the yard to ourselves.

Even as I write this story, with the event barely 24 hours past I know I am missing things. I know I have lost some of the special grace of that moment. The way he moved, the way the sun slanted into our yard, the look of accomplishment, that perfect running stride.

Those moments proliferate when you are a parent. And you can’t keep hold of them. But you are constantly moving forward into a new moment. This morning he came downstairs and roared at me like a lion (a ferocious lion) because that scares me. Then he said “Hi, beautiful” to his sister and bent over and kissed her. 

"When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it." 

His mercies are new every morning.

The Adventures of Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid

Before I get into the tale at hand, I suppose it bears mentioning how this post received its title. In the days before Owen was born, Clara and I were watching the prior seasons of Parks and Rec on Netflix in the evenings. On the night before he was born we watched it for hours as Clara started laboring. Anyway, one of the characters on the show, Andy, has a band that has had numerous names over the course of the show’s run, one of which was Mouserat (my other favorite was Fourskin, which became Threeskin when they lost a member, so to speak). When Owen was a few weeks old I took to calling him Mouserat. Clara loathed the name at the time, but my mom, who was staying with us, found it very cute and that was all the encouragement that I needed. From that day on he has been the Mouserat Kid. Clara has since come around. 

At the time I also thought it would be funny to write a series of tales about infant Owen as one of the most feared trainrobbers in the world. Since the Mouserat Kid sounded like a good name for a trainrobber, I needed an appellation for myself that would fit the nefariousness of our deeds. Hence, Toby Loco. Though, in one of the twists of the tales, it would turn out that Owen was going to be the crazy one in our gang who was quick to shoot. He was to be loved by women and feared by Pinkertons. I have yet to write the first story. But whenever we head out for adventure, I think of our duo as Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid. 

Which brings us to the story at hand. There are precious few chances for adventure in this world when you are 21 months old and live in central Kansas. Though, I suppose, conceived from a different, more Chestertonian angle, everything is adventurous when you are 21 months old. But this past weekend, wanderlust got us and we were out the door. Clara works nights at the hospital here in town and the creaky floorboards of our World War I era house necessitate that Owen and I vacate in the mornings so Mama can sleep. This week’s destination was Kanopolis State Park, about 45 minutes southwest of where we live.  

It had rained a good chunk of the day on Friday and when we woke up Saturday morning it was misting still. Clara was a bit surprised that we were carrying on with my idea to go walk several miles through prairie grass in the rain, but the weather was warmish and not windy, the latter condition a virtual once-in-a-spring type day in this part of the country and I figured if we got too wet we could just hoof it back to the car in double time. Owen likes it when I run with him on my back and I had no other ideas for what to do to kill several hours on a Saturday morning in Salina, Kansas. So off we went. 

I had known the lake was there—a friend had done a triathlon there last summer—but I had not known that there were 29 miles of trails in the park surrounding the lake. We went to an event in town called Discover Salina Naturally, which is conservative state parlance for Earth Day celebration. (We talked to one of the event organizers who said that when it was called Earth Day no one wanted to come because they assumed it was some liberal hug-a-tree festival.) There was a ranger there from Kanopolis who gave us a brochure and I was hooked. Trails are a rarity in this part of the world, and hills perhaps even more conspicuous, but this place was reported to have both. 

We got there and the mist was clearing, but it was still cloudy. I was the first car in the parking lot for the trailhead, and for all I knew given the remoteness of the park, we would be the only people there that day. The start was somewhat ominous. The trail was wet and slick. It started by turning into the heart of a canyon. Lining the walls, like something out of an old Western, were swarms of vultures keeping watch on us, waiting for a fall. Some were flying. Owen, charitably, calls them hawks when they fly. I wondered briefly if a vulture had ever lifted child out of his father’s backpack. We climbed up out of the canyon, quite literally hand over foot. It was a tricky maneuver with 40 pounds on my back, especially since 30 pounds of the weight belonged to a young fellow I am increasingly fond of.  

We topped out on a ridge and from there began a 5 mile stretch of descending into and climbing out of canyons cut by the tributaries feeding the lake. At one point I slipped in the mud and fell backward, landing on my poor son. He took it pretty well, but I figured I better compensate him with his pacifier. He gladly accepted and then tucked his head into the back of my neck and fell asleep as I sang him old hymns.  

The hike was gorgeous. I had no idea central Kansas got this beautiful. There is a great line in the beginning of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s novel, where the narrator’s father watches a sunset in central Kansas, at the gravesite of his father, and reflects on how wonderful it is to know that every place can be beautiful. I felt a bit like that. But the spirit of the line in the book is a comparative beauty. As in, compared to how bad this place sucks, this sunset redeems the despair a bit. But this would be beautiful by any standards. A herd (pack, flock, gander?) of turkeys was running across the open plains. Everything was washed in green from all of the moisture we have been getting. Trees were starting to blossom, the grass smelled sweet. The creeks swelled in newfound vigor. Cardinals and robins and mockingbirds flitted around. It was majestic. 

I knew I was pushing it timewise with Owen, so when a trail split off and took a fairly direct path back to the trailhead I took it. He woke up right about then and asked for his mama. I told him she would be awake when we got home and asked him what we would do to her. "Kiss." Smart kid.  

The path we turned on to was more directly intended for equestrian use rather than human and the upkeep reflected that. The trail was wider, but it was also soft, red dirt. The days of rain had turned it into sticky clay. We crested a ridge and I could see my car. Not hardly a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies. But as hikers everywhere know, crow distance means little. I saw a stream crossing up ahead, imagining it would be like the half dozen others I had already crossed throughout the morning. I walked up to it and found out I was wrong. Very wrong. This was closer to the lake and definitely deeper. How deep I could only guess given the murky quality of the water. I assumed there must be a crossing somewhere and went to walk down the shore a bit to spy it out. Stepping out of the water, I slipped on the mud and fell right on to a reed sticking up out of the ground. My first concern was for Owen who, after all, was attached to my back. I took off my pack to check on him and he was fine, though somehow he had lost a shoe. I put it back on him and tucked his blanket around him and then noticed a searing pain in, how shall we phrase this, the left side of my primary gluteal muscle. I did a quick hand check and came back with blood all over my fingers. My shorts were ripped and there was blood dripping down my leg and (and!) there was no other way to cross the stream than to go straight through it. I put Owen back on my back and walked down the stream each way, but there was no getting around it. It was either go through or go back the way I had just come: 6 or so miles with blood dripping out of what I could only assume was a deep puncture wound on my ass.  

I broke a reed out of the ground to use to prod the ground in front of me as I crossed, hoping it would signal me to any sudden dropoffs. And I set out. Now, let me say that this crossing on almost any other occasion would not be a big deal. If I was by myself at the end of a trail run I would happily have jumped in and swam across. But I had 40 pounds of kid and snacks on my back, making it pretty hard to swim if the water ended up being deeper than walking height. I considered dropping Owen again and walking it alone to test the depth, but I figured he would freak out if I left him in his pack and took off. The water burned in my wound as it came up above my navel. I was trying to keep Owen dry with one hand while prodding with the stick in another. Comical, I imagine. It didn't take long to cross, maybe a minute, but my lips were trembling the entire time. And not just because the water was freezing, though it was. I came up the other side and shook off like a dog. I checked Owen and his shoes were wet. Once he figured this out he gave a characteristic one word response: "Home." Again, smart boy. 

We headed back toward the car and I looked at my trail map which showed one more water crossing before the end. I thought, or hoped, that it would be another small one, but alas that was not to be the case. We had one final stream crossing to make, this time with an audience. Another one of the trails, the one we had started the day on, skirts the other side of this stream before turning away from it and there was a Boy Scout troop and a woman hiking by herself. She saw us coming to this stream and came down to see if she could offer any help. It was a sweet gesture, but I am not sure what she thought she could do. Did she expect me to toss Owen across to her? At this point I wanted to heed my son's advice and go home and so without hardly pausing we just walked through it again. The Boy Scouts were impressed and asked their troop leader if they could do that later. The woman looked at me as if I were the worst father in the world.  

We made it back to the car quickly from there. My wound was really starting to hurt, which I can only imagine was aggravated by spending some time in bacteria-filled water. We split a snack of crackers and Cuties and headed back to civilization--daddy bleeding all over the seat and Owen pointing out to me every cow and windmill we passed--and the waiting arms of our Mama. Every time Owen sees the shoes I was wearing he tells the story again of how daddy walked through water and Owen's feet got wet. 

Tune in soon for the next Adventures of Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid.

My Small Bear

I have had a busy week with work and life and reading and have done little writing, so I thought I would do some easy writing: tell stories about my son. Besides, I could spend 10 hours on a post about some deep issue and it would not garner as much interest as 20 minutes spent writing about my boy. Which should give you some idea of how awesome he is.

Owen loves being in his bed. This doesn't mean that he sleeps the whole time he is there, but that he just loves being ensconced in his crib. It is the only place he still gets his pacifier, he has stuffed animals and blankets and he can just relax--I get it, sounds nice to me at about 2 o'clock every day. Clara went in a week or so ago to get him from his nap and he asked if he could stay. A few weekends ago when Clara was at work I went upstairs toward the end of his nap to read so I could hear him when he woke up. He woke up, but he didn't fuss or bang on the walls like he does sometimes. I pressed my ear to the door to hear him. He was practicing his vocabulary. "Mama, mama, mama. Daddy, daddy, daddy. Ball, ball, ball. Yes, yes, yes. Mama. Daddy. Yes." 

He has also become quite the household helper. He currently helps us with laundry, the dishes, cooking, sweeping, vacuuming, feeding the chickens, taking out the trash, putting the recycling into separate bins, and more things I am sure I am forgetting. And here is the thing: he loves to help. Loves it. He and I were building a tower with his blocks last night and Clara asked him if he wanted to help her cook. "Stir!" he said and ditched his old man. He redeemed himself by helping me grill the chicken and playing frisbee with me while we waited.

With the change in seasons, he has fallen in love with playing "upeball", which is his gentleman's effort at baseball. We use a big air-filled bouncy ball and the attachment for the vacuum as our bat. I alternately roll him the ball and he hits it (he says tennis when it is on the ground) and upeball when I throw it in the air. He likes to pitch as well and does his best imitation of my dramatized windup. This is essentially a 360 degree spin while standing on one foot. We were having problems getting him to hit off the rug in our living room. He kept wanting to hit it off the wood floor. We got the idea to tape a batter's box into the rug. Clara put the tape down while I showed him a video of baseball players launching home runs all while standing firmly in the batter's box. We went back to the living room and showed him his box and he flipped out with excitement. Every time he hit the ball he would run into the dining room where the computer is and point to it: "Dad, I am hitting it just like those guys!"

There are many more stories to tell. Words he is learning. Ideas. It is amazing to watch him grow, so fun to see some new concept click in his mind for the first time. To connect this, however tenuously, to my post a couple of weeks ago on the declining birthrate in our country, I want to say that raising kids is extraordinarily hard and challenging and a monumental time suck, but it is liberating at the same time. I am no longer the center of my universe. My son is. As will be my daughter here in a few months.

I read a writer once talking about how paralyzed she was in her twenties because of all the options open to her--career-wise, relationally, etc.--but now that she is in her thirties and married and locked into a career she feels more freedom despite the constriction. I feel that way with parenting. In the Donne poem I quote at the masthead of this blog, the old rogue tells God that unless he is bound he shall never be free. Life is like that in so many ways. Sometimes it takes steadfast commitment and the release of self to know who you really are and what really matters. My life is bound and restricted by my son, but it is also clarified and directed. I will provide for him. I will train him in the way that he should go. And that gives me direction, purpose, and focus. On top of that, it has increased my capacity to love and give. He, along with his mother and God's grace. is the greatest of gifts to my wandering soul.

Owen Hugh Coffman

I am writing now from the living room of my house, absolutely distracted by the beautiful child laying on the floor wrapped in the blanket his great-grandmother made for him. I am a father now, weird as that is to write out. Last Friday morning, July 15^th, we welcomed our first son, Owen Hugh Coffman, into the world at 9:08 a.m. He weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces and was 21.25 inches long. He just might be the most precious thing in the entire world.

I am not really sure what to write. The reality of being a dad, of the fact that this kid will live with Clara and me for the next 18 years (at least), sometimes loving us, sometimes despising us simply has not set in yet. I don’t know that it ever will, explicitly. Eventually it will just be the way it is. This is how marriage worked. It felt weird until it didn’t. Nothing happened. Life just kept rumbling on. As it will surely happen in this case.

These are days to be treasured, though. Held close. I am jealous over my time with my son which has absolutely destroyed my productivity. There is a stack now of half-read books about John Milton and the relationship between Christianity and culture that seemed so important a week ago but have not been touched since Owen’s birth. They will seem important again. I am already feeling the pull back to the other things of this world that occupy my time. But what a gift to have nothing better to do now than stare at this beautiful and precious child.

I have an incredible wife. Sorry, I couldn’t think of a great transition into this paragraph. She woke me up at 4 a.m. Friday. We had gone to bed at one and she hadn’t slept a wink. She let me sleep for a little bit, though, and woke me up to tell me it was time. We threw everything into the car and I drove like hell to Topeka. I topped out at 95 mph but backed off a bit when a coyote crossed the road just in front of me. I figured the last thing we needed would be a deer splattered across the windshield.

We got settled in to the birthing center by five and Owen came out at nine. I cannot even begin to describe the toughness I saw from my wife. This was an all-natural birth—no medication, no doctors—just a midwife and a husband’s hand to squeeze. But she gritted it out. What’s more, she remained sweet and good-natured. The night before my calf cramped at an ultimate Frisbee game due to dehydration and I loosed a string of profanity under my breath that would make an inmate blush, and here was my wife giving birth and remaining nice and even. I feel like I have learned more about her in the past few days than I have in previous entire years of our marriage. I have fallen in love with her all over again. She is simply out of my comprehension. Sometimes I wonder if my one great virtue in this life is that I have married well.

I imagine she would not say this, but for me it went fast. All of a sudden instead of enduring contractions, the midwife was telling her to push. I asked her if she was serious, if our son was really coming. You see, part of me was beginning to believe that it might never happen. That the pregnancy was some sort of elaborate ruse and Clara had really just been eating a lot of chocolate or something. Or that our son was going to age for years in his mother’s womb. After months of anticipation and questions, imagining holding him and kissing his face and sleeping with him on my chest, I couldn’t really imagine actually doing these things. They had been abstractions before.

I lay beside her as she pushed. She squeezed my hand to the point that I am still grateful feeling returned. I watched the whole thing. It was unreal. Beautiful. The most amazing thing I have ever seen. And, frankly, it scared the hell out of me.

I am not sure entirely what I was expecting him to look like, but whatever mental picture I had, I was picturing something slightly other than human. I guess I expected him to come out coated with a bunch of gunk and be indiscernible. Imagine my surprise when I saw a head of blond hair and then a face and then the midwives helping his torso and then legs come through and then they put him up next to Clara’s chest and she welcomed him into the world. He started to cry and so did I so he wouldn’t be lonely. Clara held him close and said his name over and over again. I held her close and put my hands on him. And we were a family. We drove to Topeka as two and came home as three.

Letters to Owen

I wrote this letter by hand to my son the other day and left it on the table for his mother to read to him out loud when she got home from work (he is, alas, still in the womb). Today is our due date. Pray for us.

Dear Owen ____ Coffman,

                Listen here, little man, I don’t intend to make cutting deals a central part of my parenting strategy with you. Most of the time I will tell you what to do and expect you to do it fairly well in accordance with my prescriptions. Moreover, I imagine that I am already offering you the best deal that you will ever receive apart from grace when I promise to provide at least 18 years of three meals per day (that’s close to 20,000 free meals), 18 years of free clothing and free vacations and even free life advice. This last offer will last forever. But I feel compelled to sweeten the deal. You see, your mother is in a hellatious work situation right now and your father is something of a deadbeat this summer. I could say that I am pursuing the scholarly life (there is a sizeable stack of books beside me right now with highly intellectual subject matter), but that is only partially accurate. In any event, your arrival will hasten your mother’s retreat from this awful job, plus, we are rather excited to meet you simply for the sake of meeting you, so how about this: if you come sometime on your due date or before, I will take you on the trip of your choice when you graduate high school (within reason: for example, I don’t know what space travel will look like by that point, and within the family budget: your father will probably never be a wealthy man). So there it is. In ink. I love you and can’t wait to meet you. Now that you are fully incentivized, get out here.

Your father,

Toby Alan

DON’T READ THIS PART OUT LOUD!!!

P.S. Mom, I will probably make him this deal in any event. But that’s just between us.