This is set after the season one finale.

Bertram groaned deeply, falling down into a chair at the kitchen table of the Ross mansion. When a woopie cushion went off underneath him, his mood was not helped. Why did he stay at this job? These kids made him want to pull his hair out! Not that he had any hair left to pull out, of course, not in less his beard counted. After a day full of Luke and Zuri's tricks, Emma's demands, and Ravi's… Ravi-ness, he had suffered about as much as he could take from this overly excitable tribe of heathens,

He looked despairingly at the disaster zone that had been made of the kitchen table. After Zuri's latest arts and crafts project, it looked like a tornado had ripped through a craft store and deposited half of its wares all over the furniture. He sighed wearily once again and heaved to his feet with a grunt.

One day, he promised himself, he would switch jobs. Even the handsome amount of pay and great accommodations that he was given for working here were sometimes not worth it when it came to constantly dealing Morgan and Christina Ross's little terrors.

Shaking his head, Bertram began to right the items on the table. He picked up scissors, paints, glitter glue and pens, crayons, markers, and stickers, and then began to put wad after wad of discarded printer paper in the trashcan. Bertram would give Zuri this: whatever she had been working on, she had apparently been working on for a long while, and working hard at getting it just how she had wanted it to look.

For all this junk that she left out, she'd better have recreated the Mona Lisa, he thought with a darkening frown.

But towards the end of the piles of paper, he found her project, and it was even better than a reproduction of the famous masterpiece. Surprised at what his find revealed, Bertram carelessly threw away the last few pieces of rejected paper and then slid back into a chair at the table before picking up the one piece of paper that Zuri had left un-crumpled.

The simple drawing was sweet, something that a normal nine year old would draw. At first glance, Since the portrait was of Zuri and a man, Bertram had automatically assumed that it was a drawing of Zuri and Morgan – but then he had read the captioning that Zuri had written underneath her drawing.

Me and Bertram – because he helped me when Millie the Mermaid died.

Bertram smiled. Even though the funeral for Millie the Mermaid had been well over a month ago, it still made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside when he realized just how much good he had apparently done for the youngest member of the Ross family that day. It would appear that he had made an impression on her – and a good one at that, for once.

He set the paper back down on the table and studied it.

When it came down to it – when he was really willing to think about it – it wasn't the pay that kept him here, and it certainly wasn't his accommodations (he had crammed his room in the house so full of things that the area wasn't even comfortable to be in, let alone plush). The same reason that he hated this job was the exact reason that he never could quite bring himself to leave it.

The kids.

They drove him crazy; made him want to tear his hair out, but there were other times when they were so sweet that they made even him tear up.

As he looked down at Zuri's drawing, he blinked away a tear, deciding that maybe this job – and the Ross kids – wasn't so bad after all.

A one-shot that I wrote for a couple of my cousins, although I admit that I've had this idea in the back of my head for awhile. Enjoy everybody! Reviews make my day!:)