We love ourselves

After a day in which Will had been alternately playful, whiney, boisterous and joyful (especially while frolicking with Rob in the front yard at dusk) he decided to cap things off with some unusually sweet bedtime talk.

As he sat down for his nighttime reading with Rob, he said, “Daddy, we’re best buddies. We love ourselves. But you know who loves us more? Mommy.”

Rob apparently agreed, and Will decided to march into the bedroom, where I was reading a bedtime story to Owen.

“Mommy, he said, I love you even more than you love us.”

“No you don’t,” I told him, “I love you to the moon and back,” quoting Big Nutbrown Hare in Sam McBratney's Guess How Much I Love You.

“I love you to the butterflies!” he said.

And we got into a little who-loves-who more contest that I think we both won.