The State of the Bobiverse
Captain's Log — Stardate: Sometime After the Snow Melted But Before the Mosquitoes Got Organized
It started, as most things do in my life, with a terrible idea that felt reasonable at the time.
There I was. Two in the morning. Wedged into a fir tree with a cup of coffee going cold, watching Star Trek on a tablet propped against a branch, occasionally glancing down at the neighbor's cottage like some kind of furry, bearded satellite dish pointed at nothing. Spock raised one eyebrow at something that would've made a sensible creature scream. I nodded. I understood him completely.
I don't know how I got up there. That's not true. I know exactly how I got up there. The living room was loud, the kids had finally crashed, Mrs. Bob was asleep, and the fir tree was quiet and the coffee was hot and sometimes a man just needs to be forty feet off the ground watching science fiction at an hour that doesn't exist.
It happens.
But somewhere between the stars on screen and the ones above me, I started thinking about the crew. Where we are. How we got here. The whole improbable, expensive, wonderful condition of this thing we call the Bobiverse.
Preslow had been in a mood that day.
Not a bad mood. A Preslow mood, which is different. It's the kind that rolls in like weather — no warning, full commitment. One minute she's sunshine, curls bouncing, carrying a pinecone like she's discovered gold. The next she's a thunderclap in a superhero cape, completely refusing to eat anything that isn't pancakes shaped like a woodland creature, and not just any woodland creature, a specific one, and no Bob, that one doesn't look right, the ears are wrong.
I stood there with a spatula and a pancake that I thought looked perfectly fine.
I was wrong about the ears.
Here's what I've learned about raising Preslow. You don't manage her. You orbit her. You stay close, you stay warm, and you try to catch the quiet moments when the storm settles and she slips her hand into yours and asks you something so simple and so enormous that it cracks you right open. She did that at bedtime. Asked me why stars don't fall down.
I told her they were too stubborn.
She thought about it. Nodded. Satisfied.
That's Preslow. She'll rearrange your whole understanding of strength and then fall asleep in thirty seconds like she didn't just rearrange your whole understanding of strength.
Wilton, meanwhile, had spent the afternoon conducting a one-man physics experiment in the backyard.
The tree. The branch. The ankles. The whole upside-down-laughing-at-gravity situation I walked out to find him already deep into, blood heading south, hands flapping, completely unbothered by any of it.
I had a whole speech ready. I could feel it coming up through me, all the dad instincts firing at once — be careful, get down, you're going to hurt yourself — and I just… held it.
Because Wilton hadn't just flung himself up there. He'd chosen that branch specifically. Tested it with his hands first. Adjusted. Tried the ankle hook twice before he committed. The whole thing had a process. It had thought in it. It just looked insane from the outside, which is, now that I think about it, the story of Wilton in general.
So I stood there. Said nothing. Stayed close enough to matter and far enough away to let it be his.
He dropped. Landed clean. Looked right at me.
The grin said everything.
Did you see that?
Every time, kid. Every single time.
Mrs. Bob was asleep by the time I made it back inside, which meant the day had finally finished doing whatever it was going to do to her and she'd let it go. There's something about watching her sleep that puts the whole day in perspective. All the noise, the logistics, the invisible architecture she builds around this family without ever once asking for a round of applause — it all shows up differently at midnight when the house is quiet.
She had rearranged the kitchen that week. Again. Third time this year. I did not comment. I am growing as a creature.
She'll give me that look when the beard needs attention. She smiled that smile at Disney while I stood in the heat calculating how many pieces of gear one turkey leg could've bought. She said Bob, I need you one night over a situation with her mother, four words that meant about forty things, and I made coffee, sat down, drew a line, and that was that.
She doesn't need me to be loud. She needs me to be steady.
I'm working on it. Most days I get it right.
So there I was. Fir tree. Two in the morning. Cold coffee. Spock on the screen doing that thing where he's technically correct and somehow still wrong about everything that matters.
The neighbor's cottage was dark. The stars were doing their stubborn thing. The Bobiverse was asleep inside.
Loud. Expensive. Occasionally upside down. Smells like campfire and something Wilton definitely touched.
I wouldn't change a single bughyr of it.
Captain out.
— Bob 🪓