Points

My three-year-old is rocking back and forth on a plastic pony while I supervise my one-year-old in the Tot Spot, whose high point is a single structure with one stair on each side that my daughter climbs again and again and again.

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Still, my wife comes over and points out that I am hovering, encourages me to hang out with the other dads. She doesn’t understand my struggle with boundaries, doesn’t know that every time I look at that waving Humpty Dumpty by the entrance I see nothing but a host of fractures and dislocations.

***

But even after I make my way on over to the grill and talk to some guy I don’t know about some sport I don’t watch, I can’t stop myself from lurching every time my one-year-old wobbles, gasping every time she finds the perfect pointy woodchip to suck on.