The other morning, Hal approached me with a grin on his face. And quite a number of stuffed animals in his Batman underwear. They were all riding in the front, some poking up out of the top of his waistband while others poked out the leg holes.
I grinned at him, called him a very silly young man, and suggested that he go get ready for school.
My husband stopped by later to ask if I had seen. Jane had apparently found this behavior odd. After five years with the boy, I found her surprise itself to be odd.
After all, her two little brothers had recently decided to don every last pair of underwear they own.. at. the. same. time. The layers of fabric on their bums had become so thick that they could barely walk and sitting was a particular challenge.
Yet they wobbled around the house like absurd, skinny sumo wrestlers, shrieking with the intoxicating joy of youthful abandon and the feeling that they had just unlocked some previously unheard-of silly activity.
Needless to say, they were affronted when, looking through a “Guinness Book of World Records” style book, they came across a grown man wearing a record-breaking number of underwear pairs. “He stole our idea!” Daryl exclaimed.
Maybe this was what drove Hal to shove so many miniature stuffed animals into his pants. Or maybe, considering the large Batman logo on the fly, my husband had it right.
“Maybe this is how Batman came up with the idea of his utility belt,” he said to our baffled daughter. “He had been carrying all his tools around in his underwear, but a grappling hook is never a good thing to come loose in there.”