Gideon pounced on my head far too early this morning.

“Dad!” he yelled directly into my ear. “Helloooo. Dad! Look up! It’s morning! It’s Saturday! You don’t have to work today so we need to go play Nintendo!”

I rolled onto my side and sucked my head into the covers like a hermit crab. “noooooo….” I moaned weakly.

He tugged on my arm. “Come on Dad!” he lifted the sheets and held his eye up to mine as he pried the lid open as if he were trying to find me hiding somewhere deep inside of my head, “When?” He asked.

“Later.”

“When?”

“Ugh… Twenty minutes, dude. Give me twenty minutes.”

I felt him sit up and cross his legs on the bed behind me. “Okay. Twenty minutes. Starting…. NOW! One. Two. Three. Four. Five…”

“What are you doing?”

“Six. Seven. I’m timing you. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.”

I tore the covers off of my head and stared at the ceiling, struggling to bring the world into focus. Everything was far too bright. Swirling. Tilted. A Cheshire Cat sitting beside me on the bed slowly transformed his cruel countdown into a song by the time it reached “thirty”. By “forty” he was dancing. At “fifty” he was jumping high enough to risk putting a hole in the ceiling with his head.

“Okay,” I croaked. “You win. I am defeated. Take me to your Nintendo prison…”