Last week our three-year-old daughter magically realized that stories--the same kind we’ve always read in books before bed--can also happen to her.

I don’t know how she figured it out--one night she simply said, “I want you to tell a story about me and Darci” [her same-age cousin]. And I struggled through it, as I knew I would, because even though I like writing, I choke with impromptu storytelling. I know a good story needs a few conflicts, shouldn’t have an overbearing moral, and ends with the protagonist having changed in some way.

“Once upon a time,” I began, “there were two little girls, Lexi and Darci. And they were jumping on a trampoline [we have a trampoline], and one time, Lexi jumped up so high that she almost touched a cloud, and she realized she could fly.”

It was a flat, vague, clichéd exposition, but the look on my daughter’s face, a foot away from mine, was wide-eyed suspense.

“What happened next, Daddy?” The same mystical source which prompted her to ask for a story about herself had also taught her the correct response to the parent who has stalled on ideas.

In that story, the conflict was that Lexi and Darci were flying around and going to be late for dinner. Over the next few nights I found myself struggling to come up with an antagonist who was interesting but not scary and a plot that also wasn’t scary and didn’t involve flying. My first five or so stories for and about my daughter all involved people or animals or cars being able to fly. I have no idea what that says about me.

What I knew I needed, I thought as I lay looking into my daughter’s rapt face, was a set of family myths. Some default stories, maybe modeled on the Grimm or Brer Rabbit tales, about people she loves and places she knows. And in that child-bedtime twilight, a silence broken only by her repeating the question, “What were their names, Daddy?” I imagined Greek parents, Egyptian parents, Mayan, Roman, Asian Indian, Chinese, Aboriginal parents, sleepily weaving a cosmogony and mythology as much for their desire to worship the ineffably grandiose above and all around them as to get the children at their sides to sleep.

I’ve read with interest the posts on Dadbloggers about spanking and have seen the familiar lines drawn and exchanges made. It makes me wonder if a similar debate exists over (DUN-dun-dun...) throwing kids up in the air and catching them.

I’ve read most of the big-name baby guides and know they all say it’s a gargantuan No-No. I’ve heard the urban legends of the ceiling fans and whatnot, but my dad threw me up in the air when I was a kid and I loved it, and I throw my kids up in the air and they love it.

My dad gave us swings in the blanket, but his specialty was the “Gimpleese”. Simple, really: he’d hold us under the armpits, swing us back and forth a few times, and then toss us straight up and catch us. The name is a compound coined from our baby pronunciation of “again please.”

My kids’ favorites are the Barrel, where I hold them sideways (always over a couch or bed) and spin them around once in the air before catching them, and the Pizza, another spin but this time with them supine, one of my hands staying on the small of their backs.

What’s the consensus? Does anyone else have happy memories of airborne children, either yourselves or your kids? Anyone else have names for tricks?

Tomorrow I fly home after what will be, given my return flight from Utah to Perth, Australia, a week and a half away from the wife and kids. I came out for my little sister’s wedding, which was great. It would’ve been even better with my whole family here, but since we all came out to Utah for Christmas, we couldn’t make such a big trip again for a much shorter time than then.

So I’ve kept in contact by emailing Leah and sending videos of myself to our 3-year-old girl and almost-2-year-old boy. Leah tells me that Lexi asks her when I’ll be back and gets teary-eyed seeing videos of me. And Leah says that Tyler will say, “Daddy g’day” when he hears the garage door open.

My first reaction is, of course, awwwww. Kids are so straightforward emotionally, so honest, that it’s easy to love them: you know where you stand with them.

At the same time, though, I know the kids will have some conflicting feelings when they see me again, and so I’m preparing myself for some unexpected behavior. I know that if I haven’t seen Lexi and Tyler all day, Lexi will yell “Daddy!” when I come in, run to within ten feet of me, and then suddenly find interest in the closest thing to her, be it doll, bouncy ball, book or fridge magnets. She leaves it to me to come up and embrace her.

Tyler does a younger version of this routine. Are they playing some kind of instinctual hard-to-get? Or are they manifesting, as I fear, a measure of hurt or rejection that counterbalances their initial enthusiasm to see me?

Whatever it is, it’s usually gone when I go over and snatch them away from whatever they’re pretending to do. That seems to snap them out of their avoidance of me--but again, that’s only when I’ve been away for a whole day. I haven’t ever been away from them longer than that, so we’ll see what happens with ten days. As long as they don’t pretend to have forgotten what to call me.

I grew up with parents who were a bit stringent about luxury foods. For a while, if one of us kids wanted soda pop with our meal when the family went out to eat, we had to pay for it ourselves. Before that, there was a year and a half where my mom didn’t let us eat anything with sugar, chocolate, or milk in it.

I’m sure this contributed positively to my physical health and kept me humble, but it also made me snitchy. I used to sneak milk out of the pint carton we’d buy for my brittle-boned grandma when she lived with us. I’d stalk the pantry for anything remotely dessert-like, including raw ingredients like honey and—this is so embarrassing—carob powder. At friends’ houses, I’d never ask directly for food, but my snitchery did take the form of clumsily suggestive comments like “Hey Dan, are you hungry?” or “I’ve seen those Pop Tarts on TV. They look pretty good,” which was a lie because my family was also not allowed to watch much TV with commercials in it.

This explains my instinctive protest last month when I realized that my wife was giving our two little kids all the Easter chocolate they wanted to eat after dinner. They’ll get sick, you’ll spoil them, they’ll grow up whining until their late teens and rolling their eyes and muttering at us until they finally move out in their early thirties.

“Satiation,” my wife said. “If they can eat as much as they like every once in a while, they’ll learn for themselves when they’ve had enough.”

It hit me like my sister did once when she caught me rifling through her Halloween candy. Every Easter I eat approximately my own body weight in seasonal chocolate products. Some of it, of course, I eat with the family or at other gatherings, but it’s not unusual for me to go into the pantry, my pulse actually elevating, grab a couple foil-wrapped eggs, and palm them on my way to my home office. Or I’ll eat a piece or two of hollow Easter bunny pulled out of its box in the fridge every time I open the door to put food away after dinner. Yes, I’m snitching my own food in my own house.

Our 18-month-old son soon lost interest in the chocolate Chuck-A-Rama and ran off to chase a three-day-old balloon. Our 2-1/2 year-old-girl lasted three or four rounds. She didn’t get sick, and she told my wife “No, thank you” when asked if she wanted more.

Our two-year-old is at that stage where a typical request sounds like this: “Drink drink I want a drink Mommy drink I want a drink no, no water I don’t like it apple juice I want apple juice.”

At that same dinnertime that she asked for a drink of apple juice, I heard myself say, “Sit down, Lexi. Sit down please. On your bottom. Sit, honey. Sit down, Alexis. Sit down or you’re going to your bed.”

Oh my gosh. Do kids learn how to whine from our nagging?