"....stilettos, perfect to go with my lindy bop dress, and I'm totally babbling here, aren't I?"

There were few callers who would be identified purely from the expression on Jon's face, but Vicki had become an expert in guessing at those few. Wandering back from the kitchen with both children in tow, she raised a brow at her husband on the phone for a moment. "Let me guess ....Mataya."

Jon nodded his head in silent acknowledgment of the caller's ID, wondering what his wife would think of this latest development, chuckling a little at what Mataya was saying. "I don't even know what that is!" He might be a classy dresser, but he wasn't as knowledgeable about women's fashions as one might think. "And you are kinda, but I don't mind." He turned to follow Vicki as she wandered into the room, gesturing for her to give him one of the kids - preferably the less wiggly one. "So, are you going?"

"It all depends if I can get a sitter," Mataya told him over the phone, unaware that as she spoke, Jon was being handed his son, who immediately made a grab for the handset. "Max is visiting his mom, and Juno's got a date, so it's kind of sketchy unless I can drop Oscar with someone else. How about you?"

"Ben, no ....I'm trying to talk to ..." The voice on the other end was muffled a moment, but if sounded like he'd said, "Auntie 'Tay", which was then followed by a thunk as Jon dropped the phone. There was some muffled mild cursing before Jon recovered the phone, juggling it and the wiggling boy in his arms. "Still there" Sorry! I dropped you ....it ....the phone!"

Thankfully, his best friend was well aware of how grabby Ben was. Oscar was a few months older, and was still trying to own the whole world and his friends with flailing arms. She waited patiently until Jon had managed to restore order, yelling through the speaker, "Hey, Benji! What's up, buttercup?"

Across the room, Vicki looked up from where she was wrestling with Emily herself, both redheads wearing identical grins as Jon got the receiver to his ear again in time to catch Mataya's response to his fumbling query.

"Hey, Jonny, I'm still here," she laughed. "Having fun over there?"

"Yeah, trying to play Keep Away with Ben," he explained, though it was his own fault. After all, he was the one who'd gestured to Vicki to hand him one of the kids. "Think I need a few extra arms!" he complained with another chuckle. "So, you're not going then" Why don't you just bring Oscar here" We've got plenty of babysitters to choose from."

"I'll go if you go," 'Taya chuckled. On her end, she was watching her new dogs making themselves comfortable on the couch with Oscar, who was giggling like a maniac every time Spider licked his ear. "You do realize that dumping Oscar on Vicki means dumping Spider and Bailey on her too, right?"

Jon darted a glance at Vicki, frowning as Mataya reminded him about the two recent additions to her family. "Er, okay, maybe not, but there's Kaylee and, um ....Fliss ..." And whoever else was around on a Saturday capable of watching one small boy and two dogs for a few hours.

"Hey, if you're going, then I'll see if I can drop the baby on my mom and the dogs on Elena," Taya assured him. "Mom likes having her grandson all to herself, anyway. So are we crashing the Hydra Invitational, then" Because you know I'm gonna insist on you wearing a suit. We're gonna be supporting one of our own, we should make a splash."

"I think I'm supposed to wear this t-shirt he sent me," Jon mused aloud. Along with the hightops, he assumed. "You don't think I'm gonna be expected to duel, do you?" he asked, knowing next to nothing about the duels or the tournaments, as it wasn't really his thing. Wasn't good for his face to be letting people take a swing at him for kicks.

"Well, it's an invitational, right?" 'Taya pointed out, though she didn't sound very sure. "Doesn't that mean that the people dueling have been invited to duel, and no one else gets in" Besides, I'll be there. Anyone who wants to duel you will have to duel me first without hurting me." She cackled down the phone line at the thought of that.

"'Tay, you can't duel in stilettos. You'd either kill yourself or put someone's eye out," he argued, though he saw her point. "Okay, so it looks like we're part of the cheering squad. Maybe you should bring pom poms," he teased, the grin audible in his voice, as he shifted Ben to his other hip and swapped ears.

"Only if you wear the skirt, stud muffin!" Vicki called out from the other side of the room. Emily cackled along with her, despite not knowing what the joke was, and suddenly bounced up from behind the couch, naked from the waist down.

As Vicki chased their daughter in the hope of catching her before they had a toilet accident somewhere that wasn't a toilet this time, Taya grinned, recognizing the sound of child-centered chaos. "You wear the skirt, I'll bring the pom poms, and we can get Kruger to pose with us for photos."

"I am not wearing a skirt," he told them both, even as Vicki chased after their daughter, who was in the midst of potty training. "I thought you wanted me to wear a suit, and now you want me to wear a skirt. Typical woman. Can't make up her mind," he teased back, going around to cut Emily off at the pass - or more accurately, the kitchen door. "Hold on there, little miss. Just where do you think you're going?" he told her, just barely grabbing hold of her shirt, while juggling Ben with the other arm, the phone balanced between his chin and his ear.

"Gotcha!" Vicki swept the little miss off her feet, heading back toward the potty with a triumphant wink to her husband as Mataya laughed into his ear.

"Sounds like it's all go there, Jonny," his friend teased him. "How about I call you in the morning, and we can finalize the details while everyone's still waking up?"

"Sorry," he apologized to his friend as Vicki flounced off with Emily. "Potty training. I thought newborns were exhausting," he mildly complained with a sigh as he dropped onto the floor and settled Ben in his lap, grabbing hold of one of the many toys that littered the floor to entertain him. "Sounds like a plan. I'll talk to you in the morning then?"

"Well, there is a reason they're called the terrible twos," 'Taya pointed out with a low laugh. "Just think, you'll have one month between Emily turning three and Ben turning two to relax and wind up for another year of it."

"If we don't have another by then," he remarked. Had he really said he'd wanted six kids" What had he been thinking" "I don't know how people do it. Do you know Johnny and Liv have three of them and another on the way?" Granted, one was a teenager, and the other two were well out of diapers, but still. Four kids! How did they do it"

"I did know that, yeah." Mataya was trying not to laugh, but that smile of hers was audible even when she wasn't speaking. "You guys planning on adding to your collection, huh' Should I start planning out maternity and paternity leave for next summer?"

"Gods, no! I mean ....eventually, maybe, but not yet. I'd like to get a few months of uninterrupted sleep before we start all over again." He zoomed a miniature toy car along an invisible street and right up Ben's leg while they talked. "Let's just take it one day at a time, okay?"

His best friend laughed at his reaction. "Okay, okay," she chuckled. "I'm gonna leave you to your potty training and stuff. Talk to you tomorrow?"

"Vicki, he's not going to last the week, especially not with the little flower girl blabbing the news. How long do you think it will be before Elle finds out, if she doesn't know already?" he asked, turning his attention to Vicki and not quite noticing the conspiracy brewing in the bathtub.

"Ah, but what you fail to take into account, my good man, is that Elle knows she's going to be proposed to at some point soon," Vicki chuckled warmly, scooting just a little out of the way as the conspiracy started to move into action words near her head. "All Dom really has to do is make it memorable, and since he already has the ring safely secured in a place not even Elle would go rummaging, he has just bought himself at least a month before she starts making pointed suggestions in his direction."

"My good man?" Jon echoed, chuckling, his mouth dropping open at her suggestion. "A month! There's no way he's going to be able to wait a month. I know Dom. Once he's determined to do something, he does it. Besides, what?s the point of surprising her if she knows it's coming" The real question is how long do you think it will be before they get married?"

"No more than three months after he proposes would be my guess," she chuckled, and abruptly ducked as two soggy little terrors opened fire on their father, small hands squeezing respectively a large duck with a surprised expression, and a puffer fish that doubled as a loofah.

It looked like someone - most likely Jon - was going to be wiping down the bathroom again. He was just about to add his two cents to the wedding discussion when he was assaulted by two small children toting water toys. He howled with laughter as he found himself unexpectedly doused with water, nearly as wet as his wife. "Oh, you two are going to get it!" he warned, as he rose to his feet and started toward the pair of bubbly wet terrors.

"Noooo, Daddy!" Emily cackled as she dropped her duck, doing her best to look absolutely innocent in the face of promised retaliation. But even that didn't compare to the yelp that issued from Vicki as Ben lunged to wrap his arms around his mother's neck, using her as a human shield while he giggled into her hair.

"Jon, don't you dare include me!"

"Why would I do that?" he asked, with an almost evil smirk on his face as he scooped up a handful of water and splashed them all with it. Too bad they didn't have an Oisin like Des and Piper to clean up after them. There was a maid staff at Maple Grove, but Jon and Vicki mostly preferred to look after themselves. Thankfully, it was just water.

"Ack!" The sound erupted from all three of them in almost perfect unison as Jon's splash got his wife and children all at once. Vicki pulled a face, glaring at him good-naturedly from behind her now dripping hair as Ben let go of her to flick his wet fingers back at his father. "One of these days, I am going to wake you up with an ice cube on the back of your neck," Vicki threatened, wiping her face with the wet wash cloth.

Jon cackled with laughter at the sight of them dripping wet. How many times had he told them that the bathtub wasn't a swimming pool, and here he was inciting mischief, but it was all in good fun. "Oh, big threat, Mrs. Granger. An ice-cube. Ewwww," he chuckled again, shuddering dramatically, which was easy for him, being an actor and all.

"Yeah, well, just for that, you get to wash Emily's hair!" she informed him with a bright grin. Behind her, Emily looked up with a grin that was almost disturbingly similar to her mother's, stretching her hands toward Jon as Vicki twisted about to reach for the baby shampoo.

"Such punishment," he said with a dramatic sigh. "I'm not sure I can handle it. What do you think, Emmy' Is it okay if Daddy washes your hair?" he asked, though he already had his answer, as the little girl seemed more than willing to let her father do the job. This wasn't going to end well, Jon knew. He was going to end up as wet as the rest of them. "Maybe we should get a bigger tub," he remarked with a smirk as he knelt down beside the tub to wash Emily's hair.

"Eyes closed, little man," Vicki warned Ben as she rubbed the shampoo into his little head of hair, snorting at the way the baby boy screwed his face up as tightly as he possibly could. "Stud muffin, if we get a bigger tub, we'll just going to be inviting them to join us when we get into it."

"Nobody gets to play with Mommy's boobies except Daddy," Jon teased. Did he really just say that' Apparently, he did. The remark would likely go right over Ben's head, though Emily might get it. "Head back, Em," he told his daughter so he could pour water over her head to further wet her hair, carefully and even gently this time. He'd had plenty of practice, after all.

It said a lot for just how often the two children had shared a bath that the hair washing went with surprising ease with two parents in on it. The trouble started when it was only one of them dealing with both. "If Daddy really wants to play with Mommy's boobies tonight, he'd be a gentleman and volunteer to do bedtime, so Mommy can be OCD about cleaning up for once," Vicki suggested with a low chuckle, reaching for the jug to rinse Ben's hair clean. "Water coming, Benji, head back like Emmy."

Side by side, like the team they were, Jon and Vicki made pretty quick work of the bathing and hair-washing, taking one child each. "You've got a deal!" Jon replied, preferring bedtime to cleaning any day of the week, so long as Ben didn't whine and Emily didn't ask him a million questions anyway. The truth was he really was enjoying every last minute of family life and wouldn't trade it for anything.

"You know," Vicki said as she enveloped Ben in a towel to carry him out to the living room where they'd left pajamas to be changed into - the bathroom might be big, but it wasn't big enough for the saga of drying and changing with all four of them in there. "Even if we don't have more children, we should probably think about knocking through to the next suite anyway. An extra bathroom wouldn't go amiss, and as these two get older, they're going to want to spread out."

"You're right," Jon remarked, as he worked on emptying the tub, so he could get Emily dried and dressed. "I'll talk to Humphrey in the morning. I'm sure he won't mind." After all, they had made the big house their home, and it didn't look like that was going to change anytime soon. There was more than enough room for them there, and Humphrey like having them.

"He's the one who suggested it," she chuckled, wrestling with a giggling baby boy to get him clean and dry, and get that damned diaper back on him, before he had an accident. "But while they're small, even with little brothers or sisters, it'd be nice to have that suite through there for them, mostly. We'd get forewarning of them coming to wake us up with the footsteps having to come across two rooms, at least."

"Sounds like a plan. Are you thinking about doing it the conventional way or using magic?" he asked as he lifted Emily out of the tub and wrapped her in a towel. The conventional method would involve construction, which the little suite they called would be a mess for a while, not to mention the noise involved and lack of privacy, though there were other suites they could temporarily move into until the project was finished.

"That, I think, is what we need to talk to Humphrey about," Vicki mused, laughing as Ben emerged from his own towel to wrap his arms around her neck and give her a slightly damp hug. "It's his house, after all. Isn't it' And we don't want a grumpy Humpy." The little boy snickered, holding still for her to whack the diaper onto him before he started wriggling to try and get his jammies on without help.

"I love the original versions," his merry-tempered wife chuckled, bumping her shoulder to his as they sat together. "But then, I'm a bit gruesome when it comes to the things I watch and enjoy." Yes, even after being tied to a table by a ghoul, Victoria Granger still liked anything labeled a gore-fest. "You're just a hopeless romantic, lover boy." She leaned over and kissed his cheek affectionately.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," he pouted back at her. "And you didn't answer my question. What's cold metal got to do with Victorian morals?" He wasn't prudish by any means, but after his adventures with vampires and ghouls - the likes of which she could only imagine - he wasn't exactly a fan of horror movies.

"I never said it was a bad thing," she chuckled, sipping her tea. "Oh, Victorian values were incredibly strict. They believed that morality was learned at home, and a part of that was their insistence that women were the weaker sex. This is the upper middle class and upwards, of course. But by insisting that women were the weaker sex, and that our gender could be inflamed in lust that would overheat our minds and send us insane just by seeing a bare table leg, much less an actual ankle, they thought they were reinforcing high moral standards in their children."

Jon couldn't help but smirk a little at that, nudging her leg with his knee. "Well, you can't really argue with that. It doesn't take much for you to get all hot and bothered." As had been proven on their very first date, when they'd made out in the box seats of the theater.

Her blue eyes sparkled with impish good humor as she blew him a kiss. "Well, there has to be a reason they called me Victoria, right?" she teased laughingly. "Although I'd appreciate it if you cut my dad off if he ever asks you about having a Prince Albert."

"Why's that?" he asked further, not too terribly knowledgeable regarding English history.

Vicki bit her lip, but didn't manage not to laugh despite her best efforts. "Well ....Queen Victoria was married to Prince Albert," she explained, "but, um ....well, a Prince Albert is an intimate piercing of the male variety." She offered him her brightest, sweetest smile.

"Oh, Gods! I'm not doing that!" He couldn't help but shudder at the thought of it, not wanting to even think about how painful it would be. He didn't mind a little kink now and then, but that was going too far, in his opinion.

She snickered, kissing him once again. "I would be very put out with you if you did," she assured him. "I don't want to have to worry about you getting cold burns down there if you go out poorly dressed for the weather." She winked warmly, that grin ever present and very much her own unique way of looking at the world.

"Why would anyone want to do that?" he asked, stifling another shudder. The conversation had somehow gone from the subject of fairy tales to intimate piercings in all of about ten minutes, but that was typical of Jon and Vicki.

"It's a fetish kink thing, stud muffin," she told him, laughing as she set her cup down. A moment later, she was inserting herself onto his lap, finding her favorite place to sit as she wrapped her arms around his neck. "So no rising to the bait if my dad starts on the subject, okay' Because he'd tease you into offering proof."

"You think Christian Grey had one of those?" he asked, smirking behind his tea cup as he lifted it for a sip. Sip taken, he found her in his lap suddenly, and set his cup back down to wind his arms around her waist. "What do you want for Christmas, little girl?" he asked, vaguely reminiscent of his one-night stint as Father Christmas, though it was another detail of his past he didn't recall. He laughed at her remark about her father. "Um, he's not getting a look at it, whether it's pierced or not."

"I been a weeellly good girl," she teased him fondly, the tip of her nose circling his as she laughed in her quietest way. "What, am I not allowed to sit in your lap without an ulterior motive these days, is that what pregnancy does to me?"

"You can sit in my lap anytime you want, but don't blame me if something pops up," he warned her with a mischievous grin as her nose circled his. They both knew the teasing was going to end in the bedroom, but even after all these years, they still enjoyed the flirtation.

"Just so long as it doesn't shout Mommy, I'm happy with that," she chuckled affectionately, nipping the end of his nose. "Oh, hey, did you catch why Humphrey didn't want us downstairs with him tonight?" Once again, those eyes of hers were sparkling with mischief; Vicki really was gossip central when it came to the Grangers these days.

"Oh, Gods ....Please don't tell me he was getting laid because I really don't want to know." Was it even possible for an octogenarian to get laid" Did Humphrey use Viagra" These and other burning questions were things that Jon didn't really want to know about, but that Vicki just couldn't help keeping him informed of.

"Well, I don't know about laid, but I do know he was wearing his best suit when Irina arrived," she grinned impishly. "It's definitely a date with his girlfriend, no matter what he keeps saying she is. We should invite her over for a family dinner sometime, stop him from hiding her away where no one can embarrass him."

He could probably thank Mataya for making that match, but he was really happy for the old man. He deserved a little personal happiness in his life, besides just that of family and friends. "Agreed. I'll leave the details to you, since you know more about these things than I do. Oh, and we should have Dom and Elle over for dinner again soon." There they were, circling back to the topic of conversation again. "She adores you."

"Oh, we definitely should," she agreed with a smile. Though Elle was a relatively new addition to their circle, she and Vicki had become fast friends, their respective Englishness overcoming almost every barrier. "I need to put together a girls night soon, too. Elle should see a couple of the others when they're not chasing after children."

"A girls night?" he echoed with a laugh. "Not going to hire Johnny to pop out of a cake, are you?" he teased, remembering the antics that had gone out at his wife's baby shower. It was unlikely Johnny Storm would be popping out of any cakes anytime soon, now that he was a dad, but Jon couldn't help but tease her about it, though it had all been Miranda's doing.

"Uh ....no, not this time," she laughed back at him. "Besides, he's too busy freaking out over having a newborn to add to his brood in a couple of months. Which, I might add, is going to be hilarious to watch. We're going to have to keep an eye on them and steal the children when they look ready to drop."

"For a couple who was terrified of children, they've come a long way," he remarked, but he didn't really want to talk about his P.A. and her flamboyant husband right now when there were better things to do with his time. "What do you say, Mrs. Granger" Ready for your bedtime story?"

"Oh, does Monsieur Granger 'ave wicked plans about what to do wiz my virtue?" she asked in an outrageous French accent, nose to nose with him as she waggled her brows. She'd never been what you might call subtle, but then, given how long she'd been waiting, Jon was lucky she hadn't just locked him in his trailer on set and not let him out until he proposed.

Jon smirked, as he moved to his feet, scooping his wife up in his arms as he did so. He might not seem like the most macho of men, but he'd had no complaints from his wife, and he was more than capable of asserting his masculinity when it was called for.

"Tout a fait," he replied, in fluent and perfect French. Oddly, though he couldn't recall anything of his past, some part of his brain still remembered how to speak French and Italian, as easily as he'd remembered English.

Vicki cackled as he swept her up in his arms. As much as she wore the pants most of the time, she was definitely the girl when it came to their affection and intimacy. "I love you, Mr. Granger," was whispered against his ear as he took charge.

"Love you back, Mrs. Granger," he whispered back, a soft loving smile on his face as he carried her back to the bedroom. While they were known for being a little risqu" in the bedroom, behind all the flirtatious fun was a man and woman whose love for the other still burned brightly, even after all the years they'd been together. And given how risqu? they were behind closed doors, there was no reason to think that they wouldn't still be going strong when their grandchildren arrived.