I spent Thursday through yesterday at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, and as always, I got a kick out of watching my brother with his kids. This is a guy, mind you, who will pause while dressing for work and, clad in Kevlar, scoop up his two-year-old and start blowing raspberries on the kid’s tummy. He’ll usually preface the raspberries with a comment like “Where’s your belly button? We’d better make sure it still works!” My nephew loves it, shrieks with joy.

Yesterday, my niece had a massive blowout–the kind you could hear from the next room. While my brother began changing her, my nephew interrupted our game of catch (which had started with him asking, sweetly, “Like throw ball kitchen, Mo-ique?” which translates to “Would you like to throw the ball in the kitchen, Monique?”) to investigate. “Big poop?” he asked as my brother wiped the entire surface that the diaper had covered, all of which was gooey. A moment later, my brother’s talking in a funny voice to his daughter: “Did you hear? This is officially a big poop! Your brother said so!”

Sometimes my brother carries on conversations with his babies, just as he has done with his dogs; he uses different voices to indicate the various speakers. “Well, little girl, we just changed you, so you can’t be crying because of a dirty diaper. Are you hungry?” (then, switching to falsetto) “Yeah, Dad, that might be it.” I tried to sneakily record this, but as soon as he caught on–he always catches me–he stopped. I think the voices should be preserved for posterity, or at least for his kids; he apparently doesn’t agree.

The voices he gets, kind of, from my mom. Not that she ever carried on conversations with the pets; occasionally, she’ll direct a casual comment toward Bishop, whom even she concedes “can be good company when he behaves,” but most of her communications with critters are along the lines of “Get off the couch!” or “Get your paws off the counter and stop licking the butter!” (both examples of things she has had to say, more than once, to Bishop). But my mom loves kids, and she loves to read, and as a grade-school teacher, she read books out loud and used different voices for the various characters. My brother does the same thing when he reads to his kids. His rendition of a fairly obscure Bible story (Hezekiah holding a celebration in the temple) the other night had me trying hard not to laugh, because I didn’t want to distract my nephew, who listened attentively and stared at my brother in awe when he dropped into James Earl Jones range to indicate Hezekiah’s statements.

My brother also gets his affinity for kids from my dad. My father is amazing with small children. He can quiet fussy babies like nobody’s business, and toddlers LOVE playing with him–he’ll crawl around on all fours and let them ride on his back, get down on their level, act silly, let them play with his hair, whatever. My dad has shared his love of all things automotive and his facility with tools with my brother, who already is passing it on to his own son. There’s a very cute picture on my parents’ piano of my nephew, at around 18 months, squatting in the dirt peering closely at my dad, who’s working on a deck. And my dad has a special bond with my nephew, solidified by traditions like the walks they take whenever my parents visit.

I remember some of the same things about my dad from early childhood–the “pony rides” on his back, piggyback rides where he’d pretend to lose track of us (“Give me a piggyback ride and wonder where I am!”), his frequent rereadings of my favorite book (the now out-of-print Elephant on Wheels; I still have our copy, which is missing both covers and the first several pages). We didn’t always see eye to eye as I got older, and sometimes we still don’t. We disagree about politics and the media; he dislikes my tattoos; he was relieved, I think, that my snake died before I arrived at my parents’ house last year and has expressed murderous intent toward any new snake I might acquire. But we do share a love of Scrabble, and I’ve learned from him how to strategize and maximize my points (although he still has the all-time high score). I’ve started absorbing, a little and not with unmitigated eagerness, a few things about cars and tools. We went snowshoeing over spring break, and I just bought hiking boots so we can hike this summer.

I love you, Dad! Happy Father’s Day!

Something else about my dad: Although he was not optimistic about the chances my freelance adventure would succeed, he has never said, “I told you so.” He has never even implied it. He and my mom drove to Washington, on short notice, to retrieve me when it became clear that I was not making it, either financially or psychologically. No questions asked, no second guessing, no recriminations.