Archie and the Unbreakable Exploding Rainbow Crystals.

I’m trying to get the boys out the door and into the car to get them to daycare on time so I can maximize my coffee-shop time, but Archie wants me to witness a fireworks experiment on the front porch.

Okay, I say, locking the front door and clicking the car unlocked. It’s a hundred and five degrees at nine in the morning.

“So these fireworks are special kinds, not the breakable kinds, but made with special paints, okay?”

He asks “okay?” after every statement to make sure you’re paying attention, and if you don’t answer he’ll start again at the beginning, so you’d better be paying attention if you want to avoid melting on the porch.

“So here goes the first experiment. It’s blue and pink fireworks and they shoot from a special cannon over the lake, okay?” He makes explosions with his hands and spins in circles and does sound effects.

Yeah, yeah, good, good. I’m trying to sneak Augie into the car and get back on the porch before Archie notices to keep things moving.

“Daddy, you’re not saying it in your happy voice.”

His imagination runs on and on. Stuffed bunnies take trips on invisible jets to South America and conduct experiments on frozen ponds where they celebrate Holi by parading through the streets and in the parades which are baby parades the parents can grab any baby they like and take him home to live with them in their house which is a spaceship orbiting Mars.

It’s all so incredibly cute and wonderful. I don’t want to stifle a single minute of it because if I’m not a hundred percent enthusiastic then I’m afraid he’ll start keeping it to himself and tell a psychiatrist years later that his father stifled his imagination by not paying attention and answering in a sad voice and always trying to shove him in the car to get him somewhere on time so his father could do what? Go to a coffee shop and write stupid blogs that people click through and read and don’t even press “like.”

But it’s a hundred and five, and five-until-nine, and now Augie is already strapped in the car, so I grab Archie off the porch and start to put him in while he’s still setting off fireworks and making sure I’m paying attention.

“So now this next experiment is to make a special kind of rainbow paint that’s used to color snowballs but these balls break pretty easily so you have to be careful with them, okay?”

Okay, sounds good.

I start the car. The damn Writer’s Almanac is already on. NOOOOOOOOOOO! Not because I don’t want to hear about how much Degas hated Jews and how none of his friends could stand to be around him and all gave up on him in the end. Not even because the sound of Garrison Keeler’s voice makes me want to jam a Bic pen into my temple. But because it’s almost nine. It’s practically nine. It’s nine! Nine already! Daycare is beginning, one of my precious coffee-shop mornings has begun and I’m nowhere near a coffee shop. I’m halfway across town still and there’s an experiment happening in the back seat that requires more of my attention than an actual splitting of the atom would.

“So the next paints are made of crystals and these crystals can’t break. They can only change from soft to hard and then they turn three colors and disappear behind a cloud, okay?”

I click the radio off and answer in an honest and true happy voice.

“Tell me about the next experiment, buddy.”

“That was it, daddy. No more.”