#arant-choates

After the kids finish eating dinner, Audra puts them in the bathtub while I get seconds and Will starts clearing the table. The kids are laughing in the other room when Audra and Will jump into a cleaning mode. They talk about the preciousness of the time that exists when the kids are in the tub. It’s the only time they have to really clean house, even though it’s only a few minutes. By the time I finish my second bowl of chowder, the kitchen is spotless.

Will and Audra go get the kids out of the bathtub, and the children toddle in with their pajamas on. Audra sets dessert on the table—something called “Blondies,” which is essentially a white brownie, leftover from the night before. They are sweet and gooey and delicious. We all eat a square, then talk while Will counts off how many laps the children have run around the center of the house. The kids laugh satisfactorily when they reach lap 10.

“Tickle me,” Norah says to me. I do. When I’m too tired to tickle her anymore, she starts showing me her ability to do a cartwheel. She struggles with the landing in the way four-year-olds do.

“I’ve got a hundred dollars a week in that cartwheel,” Will says.

Will and Audra agree it would be nice to let the kids watch television for a half-hour—even though they’ve already watched “plenty of TV” today.

“It’s amazing how captivated they are by it,” Will and Audra say. I can tell they feel guilty, they worry about how much TV they’ve allowed their children to watch, which is no-doubt somewhere way south of the average American child’s screen time.

I see how worked Will and Audra are, and I can sense the shared exhale they feel when the kids are sitting together quietly on the couch, and I think, “They do this every…single…night.”

No matter where you are, if you want to invite me to dinner, I’d love to come. In return, I’ll do my best to be a good conversationalist and document a small piece of your everyday life. I’m a fun dinner guest, people. Kids love me. I’ll give your pets a lot of attention. If you want to invite your newly divorced, mildly attractive friend over for dinner, too, so she can practice flirting with a single dude, I don’t care! I can do that for you.