This time of the year, my wife perks her ears up and starts thinking about what gift I might want for Father’s Day. My four year old son doesn’t, bless him. I never want anything, but this year I’d like something very specific for Father’s Day: fewer dads.

Sure, there’s tons of stuff I could conjure up on a selfish little Father’s Day wishlist. I could – much to the chagrin of ad wizards and marketers everywhere – use a new tie. Or, if my son can muster up enough gusto to crank out “DAD” in crayon on a piece of construction paper, it’d be great. But I’m a simple man; I just want guys to stop having kids if they’re not fully committed to the idea of fatherhood.

When my son is pretending to be a superhero, or playing with superhero action figures, his imagination is at its best. And when he’s engaging in superhero play around his friends, or even just a washed-up old dog like me, creativities collide and create something even better.

Let’s get this out of the way; a couple of weeks ago, Hasbro sent me some Iron Man 3 toys to play with: a bigger, motion-activated, talking Arc Strike Iron Man figure, and a couple of Iron Man Assemblers – little action figures whose arms and legs come off so you can mix-and-match them. Also, an Arc FX Gauntlet, which shoots foam discs and will leave a welt at point blank range.

So one day, my son came home from preschool and handed me his Iron Man action figure that he’d brought in for share time. As he handed it over, he told me plainly that there’s no “Iron Man stuff allowed at school.” There had to be a story behind it, I thought. The statement evolved into a shrug and “no superhero stuff,” but we didn’t have much else to go by.

With one hand, my son is smacking the kid next to him on the top of the head, and with the other hand, he’s forking salad off of my wife’s plate.

Before I can say “stop” for the sixty-third time today, I look over at the boy’s father and he gives me the universal sign for “don’t worry about it,” and says “he eats salad, that’s great!”

The other mother is talking to my wife. Other Mom says “you guys are lucky. If it’s anything healthy, Joey won’t eat it.”

Other Dad mouths “watch this” and turns to Joey. “I’ll give you a dollar if you eat that watermelon.”

My son is eating their other son’s watermelon right from under his nose. Joey’s negotiating fractions of a slice to cents on the dollar.

I don’t know how we went four years without having to sit at a family table at an event. I suppose we’d just left our son home with a babysitter for the weddings, baptisms and other shirt-and-tie stuff we’d been to since he was born. This Saturday event, a baptism brunch at a country club, was the first time we had an assigned table and had our son with us. Even at my sister-in-law’s wedding, there was a kid’s only table in another room. So this was new to us.