The above video should give you a pretty clear idea of what passes for humor in the Project Dimmel household.

Folks are often surprised to learn just how ribald the comic sensibilities are around here. “You have three daughters” they say, “that must be so charming!”. It is, of course, but that’s not really what people are getting at when they tell me what a picnic raising girls must be. What they mean is that it must be so nice to have girls as opposed to boys. While I’m behind this idea 100%, I think it may be instructive for people to learn what life is really like with three daughters. Of course there are benefits; the girls love hugs, they sing and dance all day long, my appliances are covered in heart warming doodles of the girls and their mother strolling hand-in-hand through HeartCloudLand whilst rainbows and sparkles refract into glorious patterns. While boys on the other hand, they smash everything they can’t easily stab, they slouch and swear all day long, and when they can manage to stop teasing the pets long enough to pick up a crayon, they usually draw something along the lines of an F-14 strafing a queue of fleeing civilians. So yes, it is a pleasure to have three daughters, but there is a dark side, too. While Mom fares well in the kids drawings, games and imaginings, I remain the target of all their cruel taunts and jibes, none so malicious as their favorite game: Daddy Hippo Gets Attacked.

It all started innocently enough. The girls were pretending to be leopards, sleek, stealthy, beautiful, agile. I wanted in, so I pretended to be a Daddy Leopard guiding his cubs to safety or hunting a zebra for dinner or fending off some barbarous baboons. Whatever it was, they stopped me short and made it very clear that in this game, I was to be Daddy Hippo and I was going to be hunted by leopards until they wore me down, dispatched me with a Swift Bite To The Back of the Head, and feasted on my entrails. I tried in vain to declare the hallway at Project Dimmel HQ a safety zone (the cool waters of the Masai River) where I could recoup but they would have none of it. They quickly developed an astonishingly deep rule set for the game with cruel calculus wherein every move I made, every attempt to free myself from their clutches, every plea for mercy, only resulted in Daddy Hippo being set upon by three ravenous leopards and torn to smithereens.

The game is fun–don’t get me wrong–and the girls beg me to play it all the time, the point is that they could have made me anything. I would have been happy to be a zebra, an antelope, a hyena, even a baboon, but they made me a hippopotamus. The nastiest, smelliest, fartiest creature in creation and they’ll have it no other way. But look, I could pretend I’m too-busy-to-play-right-now, or I can lean in and take what I get. So I’m Daddy Hippo, I’ll never-ever win a game of Daddy Hippo Gets Attacked, and the above video is Fellini-esque in my daughter’s opinion. Having girls is not all sunshine and lollipops. Yet, they still snuggle me all the time–even if they tell themselves they’re leopards and they’re tearing me to shreds. Maybe Daddy Hippo wins after all.