When it's time to go to bed, Gabriel has one question every time: "Take a bath wid me, Papa?"

We play with all sorts of toys at bathtime, me and Gabriel.

We don hats and beards, even goatees. They are made of bath bubbles, of course.

We play with cars, boats, and even a submarine, which has battery-powered propellers that entitle the submarine to move around underneath the bubble-covered surface, so we never know where it will end up, and lots of times we have to really hunt for it.

We play with Gumby and Pokey. We have three different sizes of each.

We play with balloons, which Gabriel one day stretched over the mouth of the faucet, turned on the cold water only, filled up the balloon, and then tried to squirt papa with it, while laughing like a carefree pirate.

And Papa even brings in animals from his big collection, different ones each time, and these animals have an array of talents not to be believed. They can sail boats, go deep-sea diving, and retrieve heavy objects from the ocean floor. They can dive off really high cliffs. And live. They can race, and climb and act like rockets. Some of them even talk. But the one thing they never do is behave.