babe magnets

This morning, Ezra and Levi had a friend from school over. She’s in Levi’s class, but because she’s a girl, she’s more mature than the both of them. Put together. Like, if you added Levi’s maturity to Ezra’s, she’d still come out on top.

But for some reason Adina seems to enjoy their company. Part of it may be that she likes keeping them in line. I heard her chide them more than once for their poor manners. “Ezra,” she said when they were having a snack and he was sliding down lower and lower on his bar stool. “Sit up straight.” (“Okay,” he said happily.) Part of it may be something like the opposite: she can let her hair down when she’s around them, and let her inner wild child come out to play.

It’s much easier to see why the boys like her. She’s adorable and smiley. She has big brown eyes and bouncy curls. And she’s an excellent storyteller. “One time,” she told me, “when I was a baby and my mommy was cooking I threw a ball? And it bounced on her head and then the counter and then the floor! And then her hip!” Oh, how we laughed.

I can tell my boys like Adina because in her presence, they act stupider than usual. Throwing colored pencils across the playroom, calling each other “butthead,” poking holes in their sandwiches and then wearing them as rings: They understand intuitively that this kind of behavior impresses girls.

But there were moments, too, when all three of them magically connected, in their own bizarre world of imaginative play. At one point they came downstairs and Ezra was leading Levi by one end of my pearl necklace, the other end of which was wrapped around Levi’s neck. “This is our bear,” Ezra explained. “His name is Lissus. Adina is my sister and I married her, and now the bear is ours.”

“So you married your sister, huh?” I said.

Adina obviously wanted to change the subject. “He’s a very talented bear,” she said. “He can stand up on two feet like a real human!”

“Humans don’t stand on two feet, silly,” said Levi.

“We’re human,” Adina pointed out, “and that’s what we do.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Levi, giggling.

And then Adina and her brother-husband and their bear wandered off.