Prompt: Thousand.
"Are you guys nearly ready?" Emily calls from the hallway.
"Nearly!" Aaron calls back. Abbie chimes in: "Nearly!" She's parroting a lot lately, and learning so many words so quickly.
Emily smiles and raises her eyebrows at Jack. "You believe him?"
"Nope."
She peers around the doorway. And her heart melts. Aaron is on the sofa with Abbie perched on his knee, and he is honest to god braiding her hair. She's only little, so it only reaches her shoulders, but he's just about successfully managed to form two tiny pigtails, and now he's clipping the flyaways back with purple clips Penelope got her for her third birthday. They even match her outfit. He turns sheepishly when he hears Emily come in. "How'd I do?"
She crouches in front of them and kisses Abbie's nose. "You look beautiful!"
"Daddy!"
"I know, I saw! Daddy did a good job."
"Mommy now."
"Oh, no chance," Emily says, laughing as she stands up and takes Abbie from Aaron's lap, shifting her onto a hip and heading for the door. "We have a soccer game to get to – we can't make your brother late."
"Sounds like an excuse to me," Aaron says slyly, tugging at the back of her hair.
She opens the front door to let Jack out to get his boots – they stay on the front step – and turns in the doorway, catching him off guard with a kiss. "I love you," she says softly.
"Oh yeah? How much?"
"Infinitely."
"What's infinitely?" Jack says, already half way down the path.
"Unimaginably big. So big it's not even a number, you can't count it."
"Big," Abbie says, nodding.
"Yeah," Emily replies. "Really really big. And you know how much I love you guys?"
Abbie wraps her arms as far around Emily as they'll go and squeezes. "A thousand!"
