Way 73
Learn some really corny kid jokes and use them often.

"What in the world?" Jeff wondered aloud as he stopped just inside the door leading from the garage to the laundry room.

There were gales…gales…of laughter coming from the direction of the living room. So Jeff simply had to investigate.

He entered to find four-year old Gordon and three-year old Alan with red cheeks, tears streaming down their faces, clutching their stomachs and rolling around on the floor. Scott and Virgil were grinning ear-to-ear from next to each other on the couch, and John was tucked into an armchair with his nose buried in a book.

"What's this all about?" Jeff asked.

John looked up, rolled his eyes and went back to his book.

Virgil tried – pretty successfully – to look innocent. Not a bad poker face for an eight-year old, Jeff mused. Scott's grin just widened. "I taught them some jokes."

"Oh, Scott," Jeff said with a shake of his head.

"No, Dad, clean jokes!" the eleven-year old said. "Honest!"

"Kids' jokes," Virgil clarified.

"Ah," Jeff said, not quite sure if he believed them. Well, it didn't matter now anyway, because it was time for him to haul out the dinner he was pretty sure his mother had left warming in the oven and get his kids fed, bathed and into bed.

He pretty much forgot about the jokes. Or so Scott thought.

One week later…

Scott walked through the garage and into the laundry room. He and his friends were hot and sweaty from shooting hoops on a summer afternoon, so he was after some bottles of water.

"What in the world?" he wondered aloud as he stopped and shut the door behind him.

He knew those laughs better than he knew his own. Wondering what had them going, he passed right by the refrigerator, but stopped when he heard his father's voice.

"When's a bus not a bus?"

"When?" Alan asked.

"When it turns into a street!"

Scott had to chuckle.

"What did the baby corn say to the mama corn?"

"What?" Gordon shrieked. Evidently they'd been at this for a while.

"Where's the pop corn?"

Alan howled, mostly because Gordon was, Scott guessed, as he stifled a snort.

"What do you call a fly with no wings?"

"What?"

"A walk!"

And that was it. Gordon was completely gone, and Al was right behind him.

Scott passed through the dining room and came to a stop in the doorway of the living room.

Jeff looked up and quickly tucked something into the couch cushions as he rose to his feet. "Done with your game, son?" he asked like there weren't two completely incapacitated toddlers on the floor at his feet.

"Yep, just going to take some water out to the guys."

"You do that."

Scott looked at his father quizzically.

"What?"

"Nothing," Scott replied. He looked at Gordon and Alan again, then turned and headed back to the kitchen and ultimately back outside.

Five hours later…

Scott crept down the stairs into the living room, and made a beeline for the couch. He stuck his hand between the couch cushions where he was certain he'd seen his father ditch whatever he'd had, but could find nothing. In frustration, he took the couch cushion completely off, but there wasn't anything other than a handful of old Cheerios, a couple of dimes and a whole lot of crumbs under there.

The living room light flicked on and he froze halfway to putting the cushion back.

"Lose something?" Jeff asked.

"Uh…yeah, thought I might've lost my pen here," Scott replied as he put the cushion all the way back.

Suddenly something was coming over top of his head and stopping right in front of his face. Scott blinked and looked at it. "Seriously?" he said, grabbing it from his father's hand. "Where'd you get this?"

"Local library, you ought to try it some time."

"Daaaad."

"You may want to have a look at it, Scott. From what Gordon tells me, my jokes were way better than yours."

Jeff left his eldest sputtering in his wake as he flicked the light back off and went upstairs.

In his hands, Scott held a book entitled 101 Clean Jokes Your Kids Will Get. A piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. Scott stooped, picked it up and went to stand next to the window so he could read it in the moonlight that streamed through.

It read:

To the son who's always been able to make me laugh. Thank you, Scott. Love, Dad.

Nineteen years later…

Scott lifted the last box of his belongings onto the couch in his sitting room, ripped the packing tape off and opened it up. It was full of books, old hard cover ones that for one reason or another he'd chosen to keep throughout the years.

One by one he placed them on the floor-to-ceiling shelves built into one wall of his sitting room, until he came to the last book. He picked it up, rubbed the cover with his thumb and smiled as he remembered that day so many years earlier when it had been given to him.

His suite door swished open and he turned to find his father entering the room. As he moved, something fell out of the book and fluttered to the floor without him seeing.

"How's the unpacking going?" Jeff asked.

"Great, this is the last of the boxes," Scott replied, jerking his thumb at the empty box on the couch.

"Oh," Jeff said softly, eyeing the book in Scott's hand. Then his eye caught something white on the hardwood floor. He bent down to retrieve it, saying "You dropped something," as he righted himself.

Then he actually looked at what he had in his hand. His eyes crinkled and came to rest on his boy's face, having to look up now to do it, unlike back then. "Oh," he repeated. He handed the paper to Scott and made for the door. As it swished open, he stopped with one hand on the jamb. "You still make me laugh," he said, hesitated for a moment, and then was gone.

Scott swallowed hard as he slid the paper back into the front cover of the joke book, and placed the book in its new home. Maybe tonight he'd haul it out and see if it could still make them all laugh like it always had when they were young.

Maybe.

Way 74
Hold a family meeting and get your kid's input on important decisions.

All right, here it went…his very first family meeting as head of the family in question.

Oh, boy.

He wasn't quite sure about this, because in spite of the fact that each Tracy man was indeed treated as the head of their own family, and then all together everyone just took their places as part of the family en totale, this was the first time he'd actually gone up to Tin-Tin and said, "We need to have a family meeting."

She'd gotten an awfully funny look on her face, then smiled and nodded and said she'd have Melati there whenever and wherever he chose.

Ha. Score one for men everywhere. Because if you can get Tin-Tin to agree to anything without arguing about it or questioning it to death first, you are seriously The Man.

Or so he thought.

So when he walked into the 3rd floor conference room, expecting to see his beautiful pregnant wife and his lovely little daughter, he was…a little unprepared for what he actually did see.

"SURPRISE!" yelled out the entire complement of Tracy Island.

"Surprise?" he blinked, and willed his heart to back down from his throat. "It's not my birthday."

"No," Tin-Tin said coyly, sashaying up to him as only she could. "But it's the very first time you ever called a family meeting of your own family, so…surprise!"

Alan's eyes widened. "You told them? Everyone? Tin-Tin, that's…that's embarrassing!" he hissed.

"What, them? Oh, no, they're not here because you called your first family meeting. I didn't tell them about that at all."

Now he was perplexed. Seriously, completely, totally perplexed. "Then wha—?"

"Congratulations, son," Jeff said, grinning from ear to ear as he stuck out his hand.

Alan took it, and he shook it, and his face puckered even further because what the actual fuck, anyway?

Sometime later, after every single person in the room, kids who could speak included, had shaken his hands or hugged him and said congratulations in just about every way known to man and finally left him and his little family alone, Alan took his pretty, pregnant, glowing wife out of Mellie's earshot and whispered, "If this isn't some 'you're all grown up now rite of passage' party because I called my first family meeting, then why the hell was everyone congratulating me like that?"

"Because, Alan," she said, smiling sweetly and giving him a peck on the cheek. "We're having twins!"

So he did what any man would do, under the circumstances. He fainted dead away.

Tin-Tin looked down at him with a Yeah, that's how I figured you'd take it look on her face and whispered, "Surprise!"