Hi, My Name is Bob

We’ve been going through a little phase lately… our oldest has renamed himself Bob. You know, as in “the builder”. Upon introducing himself to anyone new, he insists that his name is Bob. Some people believe him. Until we interject – “his name is not Bob, it’s Brogan.” To which he pipes back, “No it’s not! My name is Bob!” Well okay then.

This past weekend we were working a booth for our gym at a benefit festival, and he introduced himself to the MC as Bob as well. Which turned out to be funny when Brogan asked if he could sing a song using his microphone. It’s hard to turn down this sort of request from a charming 4-year-old, so as I sat at our booth I hear the announcer over the loudspeaker say, “We’ve got Bob here, and he’s going to sing a little song for you all today.” I couldn’t help but laugh.

And then this last weekend for Father’s Day, I asked Brogan to sign the card to Blake. I handed him the card and the pen and he started writing… B… “good job buddy!” I said… O… I stopped him, “bud – I think you forgot the R”. “No I didn’t” he replied. And he continued writing…. B. And he looked at me and smiled. I busted out laughing and asked him how he knew how to spell Bob – his response, “I just knew, mom!” Blake got the same kick out of it when he opened his card.

I guess this is a way for him to assert his independence – to have some control over some aspect of his life. I suppose it doesn’t do any harm and the more we try to correct him the more he’ll dig his feet in and then who knows how long “Bob” will be around.

But I’ve decided that when Brogan does something awful, I’m just going to blame it on Bob. Because certainly that sweet baby that I gave birth to and named Brogan could not possibly get into half the trouble that my child gets in. No way. So just the other day “Bob” took things to a new level. Where his shenanigans and destruction impacted someone outside of this house and where Blake and I will literally be paying for it.

So we had a guy come to our house to purchase some broken lawn equipment. The guy backed up his truck in our driveway and was loading up the lawn mowers when my hammer wielding “Bob” came out to “do some work”. In the blink of an eye, I hear the hammer hit metal, and look up in horror as I see a gash about 10-inches long on the side of this man’s truck. This man’s nice truck. This truck that he obviously took pride in and took care of. That truck. And about 30 seconds later, this nice man noticed the same scratch and was just sick about it. Even though I knew the answer, I asked Brogan… I mean Bob, “did you do that?” He hung his head down in shame, “Yes.” Let me tell you, if you’ve never been here it’s a pretty awkward place to be. The guy was a nice guy and you could tell that he didn’t know how to handle the situation. But I told him that we’d take care of it, and wrote him a note to that effect. Well the next day I get a call from him and he already had three estimates… and when you factored in the rental car that would be required, it was looking like we would be out $1,000. Luckily I called our insurance company and discovered that incidents like this fall under the liability portion of our policy for which there is not a deductible. However we did lose our 15% discount for no claims, but I figure with 3 kids, some sort of claim is inevitable. Our insurance company even had a specific code for “innocent acts by a minor” (and although it could be argued exactly how innocent this was), apparently this sort of thing happens.

So Bob, thanks for keeping things interesting. We love you in spite of (and also because of) all the excitement you add to our lives.