Several parents had told him in recent years how tiring they found playing with their children. He listened to fellow Dad’s groan about coming home from a long day at work to requests for stories and games when they wanted to just relax with a beer, to Moms talking about how thankful they were for ‘Dora the Explorer’ so they could just get a break from their kids.
Nat always found that kind of strange. Not that he was one of those parents who ban TV in its entirety, he could see the use - when he actually had to get some work done during the day he might leave Kitty with a cartoon, so he could phone a client, but - well, he liked playing with his kids.
He loved arts and crafts, he loved watching their minds work, he had fun teaching them games and telling them stories. That to him was the fun stuff, surely the point of having children! It was the discipline stuff he found difficult - the things he had expected Marina to handle.
Which might be why this playdate had turned the den - which more closely resembled a playroom than it did a family room in truth - into a chaos scene. He didn’t mind. The tables was still strewn with pipe cleaners from when they’d gotten home and made entire families of bizarre chicken like creatures before they decamped to the floor. That is where they were now, Alex and Zach surrounded by a sea of lego bricks as they built ‘spaceland’ and discussed the aliens, Nat himself helping by building a sip to take them there and watching Sara mother Kitty - an activity he could recognise Kitty was getting too tired to tolerate. She was her mother all over - he saw Marina every time they looked at their daughter and had no doubt she would grow up to be a firecracker who was utterly certain of her own mind and knew how to wrap him around her little finger.
Hearing the doorbell ring he stood up, scooping up his daughter from their visitor’s lap.
“Stay with the astronauts Sara - me and Kitty will go see whose at the door” he told her with a smile, shifting his daughter onto his hip as he went to answer, offering a smile to the woman he stood there.