Page 59 of Here You Are

I walked up to Linden and asked her, “What’s up?”

“I need help. I’m trying to make lily pads for Leapfrog, but they all look dumb. Brook won’t help me.”

“I’m busy working on my part!” Brooklyn hollers back.

I suppressed a giggle over their bickering and said, “I can help. Let’s pull up a picture you like on my phone, and we can copy it. Does that work?”

I pulled up images of cartoon lilypads on my phone and let her peruse the selection for one she thought would be manageable to draw. She picked a very simple design.

“What if we set this down where you want to draw, and you just try to copy it? If you still can’t get it, I'll help you. I think you should try doing it yourself first.You know what you want it to look like now. Can you do that?”

She replied with a huff and an “I’ll try.”

We sat down together with the image, and she started drawing while I gave a few verbal directions. It took her only a minute or two until she had an acceptable lilypad drawn.

“Thanks, Cassie. That made it a lot easier by having something to copy. I’m going to go get my tablet so I can look up other pictures if I need help,” she said, running to the house.

I scooted over to Taylen and said, “Hey, sweetie. What are you making?”

“Squiggles.”

“And what do you do when you get the squiggle part of the path?”

“You just squiggle. Like this,” she says as she starts wiggling her butt in her hunched-over position.

“Ooh, I don’t know if I can squiggle as good as you can.”

“Yes, you can! Just try it, Cassie!”

So, in my hunched-over position, I start wiggling my butt, just like she showed me. We were giggling and squiggling until I heard a manly throat-clearing noise. I paused mid squiggle and looked over my shoulder to see Ben staring at us. He basically looked like a cartoon character with hearts popping out of his eyes.

“What’s going on over here, ladies?”

Taylen started shaking her butt and said, “I’m teaching Cassie how to squiggle her butt, Daddy.”

“You are? Wow, that’s so nice of you to show her. I could have sworn she already knew how, though,” he replied back with a dirty little smile on his face.

“Nope, definitely my first time squiggling,” I said back to him.

“Hmmm, I definitely thought I had seen you do something like that before, but I could be wrong.”

I know what he is alluding to, and quite frankly, I’m shocked he would so confidently bring up naked bouncing activities in front of his baby child. Clearly, she doesn’t know what he is innuendo-ing, but I do, and it’s going to make me start sweating, so I just rolled my eyes at him and turned back to our drawing.

“Cassie, I promised the girls when we got done mowing, I would pull out the firepit so we could make s’mores. Do you want to join us?”

Taylen pulled on my shirt and said, “Yes, Cassie! Make s’mores with us! Linden isn’t even allowed to make them herself anymore since she started the big fire.”

This comment causes Ben to chuckle and then stop in a panic. He starts frantically looking around. “Oh, God. Where is Linden? She better not be trying to start a fire. I’ll end her.”

“Pause, Ben. She went inside to grab her tablet so she could look up chalk designs. She isn’t burning anything down.”

He let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God. I thought I was pretty clear that she is responsible for preventing forest fires, but you never know with that one. Anyway, come make s’mores with us. I’ll text Jenkins and see if she wants to join us as well.”

“No need to text me. Already on my way!” she hollered from her front porch.

Ben looked at me with alarm and whispered, “She has freakishly good hearing for someone of her age. We need to remember that.”

“You can’t break wind in your own bathroom without her hearing it; I swear.”