Page 55 of A Little Bit Naughty

Daddy pretended to eat it, then nibbled on each of his fingers. “Be careful, baby boy. I might forget that you’re not a plant and eat you all up!”

“Don’t eat me, Daddy!” he shrieked, running across the room.

Daddy’s laugh felt like sunshine. “You go find your toys, darling boy. And I’ll go get Roarasaurus. Do you still want me to call Tommy’s Daddy?”

“Yes! Call him now. Tell him to tell Tommy about my toys.”

Daddy raised one eyebrow. “What do we say?”

“Pleeeeease, Daddy? With ice cream and sprinkles and a cherry on top?”

“Whatever you want, sweetheart. I’ll be right back.”

“OK!” Izzy barely even noticed Daddy leaving because he wasn’t really going anywhere. And Izzy had toys to discover.

12

Remi

Remi wasn’t even a little disappointed that Tommy and Brick couldn’t come over for a few more hours. He made up the bed with a set of rocket ship sheets and pulled in the rolling desk chair from his office so that he could sit in the playroom without hurting his back.

In between, he couldn’t get enough of watching Izzy play. He’d started with the dinos, but then branched out into what was becoming a full-fledged dinosaur-and-carnivorous-mammal block city.

One of the things that Remi had discovered about Izzy was that he was a little songbird. The dinosaurs had working songs, dancing songs, and marching songs. It was endlessly fascinating watching Izzy arrange them and tell their stories, and Remi often found himself getting pulled into their adventures.

After about an hour, he noticed Izzy starting to get restless, his position shifting every few minutes. “Baby? Do you have to go to the potty?”

“No,” Izzy shook his head. “Knees hurt.”

Crap. Remi hadn’t even thought of that. In his mind, the finished playroom was going to have a large, bold rug for the center of the room, and perhaps a few smaller ones in different areas—something plush and soft by the bed maybe, and a city scene for driving cars near the toys. But that was all in his imagination.

He knew that Izzy would only be here for a few days, but maybe if he ordered some things online, they might arrive quickly.

In the meantime, he found a sleeping bag in the closet and laid it out on the floor. Izzy was delighted with it, asking for a second one so that he and Tommy could go camping together. Remi gave him a spare blanket, folded in half, which was the best he could do.

Then he remembered he had something else. His niece’s birthday was coming up on Wednesday, and he’d gotten her a few small throw rugs. Since he’d gotten her a couple other gifts, he didn’t think she’d notice the loss if he used them for the playroom instead.

They were shaped like large flowers, one pink, one purple, and one yellow, so he hoped they weren’t too girly for Izzy to feel comfortable sitting on. He still had a lot of questions about Izzy’s experiences, but he thought they would make the room more comfortable and cheery while giving his boy somewhere soft to sit.

They were rolled up in a large pink gift bag, and he definitely wasn’t going to give them to Izzy that way. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that pink gift bags were out. He folded it up to save for another occasion.

He brought them in a bit hesitantly. “Hey, sweetheart,” he said softly.

“Hey, Daddy.” Izzy hadn’t seemed to mind Remi coming and going, but whenever he came back, he got a special smile. “Look at my slide!” Izzy had stacked a half-dozen triangular wooden blocks on top of the rectangular ones to create a thin, precarious slide. He tried putting a plastic dinosaur on it, and it only made it past the first block before toppling over the side.

Izzy giggled. “It’s too tall.”

Remi knelt down beside him, ignoring the twinge in his neck. “Can I make a suggestion, baby boy?”

“Sure.”

“What if you made a big slide like this?” He stacked up a few of the larger rectangular blocks, then leaned a large hardcover picture book against them.

“Ooooh! That’s smart, Daddy. That’s why you’re an engineer.”

Remi chuckled, dropping a kiss on Izzy’s head. This couldn’t be farther from his actual work, but he took the compliment for what it was: Izzy was impressed by his Daddy.

“Oh, and I found something else.” He shook out the top rug. He’d carefully put the yellow one on top. “They’re giant flowers, like the ones that dinosaurs eat.”