“You don’t have to come with us, honey. You can stay at the beach all day. I’m totally cool with that. I’ve got this,” I said to my wife.
These are the words that I told her on a Thursday during our beach vacation. I never expected her to come. This was supposed to be my gift to her. I was going to give her the entire day at the beach by herself. She could drink fancy adult drinks while diving into a beach book with an umbrella in her hand and a nice young man asking her what she wanted for lunch. I even bought her a brand new beach chair. This is what she could have been doing all day. She could catch some rays without any baby vomit on her.
“No, I want to go,” she said and inside, I knew that the kids and I would break her. I didn’t want to. I tried to give her a way out.
I don’t think she understands what it means to adventure with the kids and I. She’s used to attending meetings in well-lit conference rooms while discussing million dollar budgets. Lattes brought to her by interns and client dinners of steak and a nice glass of wine. That’s not how the kids and I do things.
You have to go hard with the kids, you have to be all in. You have to keep your energy level up to match their excitement. And when the excitement is missing, you have to provide it for them. You have to motivate them like a general on a battlefield. Otherwise, they would want to stay inside watching TV all day, and we just can’t have that.
No! We are out in the world, we are in a part of the country we have never been to before! There are things to be seen, quests to pursue! Thursday is adventure day! I asked her if she was sure if she wanted to go.
“Yes, I’m sure!” The poor girl.
It’s like watching someone taking the wrong exit into the bad part of town. You think: yup, this isn’t going to end well. We should watch the news tonight to see if they were carjacked.
When the kids and I go adventuring, it can be an endurance race. If I do it right, at the end of the adventure, we are usually exhausted. There is no relaxing. It is constant motion, never-ending wonder and conquering. When there is a problem we deal with it and make it part of the story. We build the memory whether or not the memory wants to cooperate with us or not. Did she understand this?
No.
I asked her one more time. Just to be sure she knew what she was getting into. You are going adventuring with dad. Are you sure?
I do this every day. I have molded my entire experience of being an at-home-dad on this type of stuff. I have trained for years. This is not an office job. There is no lunch break where you talk about adult things. There is no marketing strategy to rework. There are crayons and dirt, baby vomit and antiques, apologies and memories. Ten to one there will a Port-a-Potty involved somewhere along the way.
“Are you sure you want to go?” I asked.
“Yes! Stop asking. Let’s get on the road and do one your famous kid adventures!” There is only so much one can do but dammit my little office trooper earned my respect.
And so we did. We climbed through a battleship, up the stairs to a tower, laid down in bunks that brave men used in WWII. After several hours, my wife asked if we were done. The kids and I laughed because we hadn’t even been to the forward gunnery. After another hour, she again asked if it was time to head home. No, it was time to go to the lighthouse. On the way, we stopped by a fruit stand and took a little just now discovered hike.
“Do we have to go all the way to the top of the lighthouse?” she asked once we took the first stairs. I gave her my look of pity and assured her that we would grab her on the way down. She wanted to protest, I could see it in her eyes. But the heat of the day was starting to get to her. I suggested that she could pick out something in the gift shop which had air conditioning.
“Ok, that was a fun day,” she said as we met her at the bottom an hour later. “Are we all done?”
This time our seven-year-old daughter gave her the look of pity that said: “you poor dear, daddy is just getting started.”
On and on we went, seeing the weird and the different. A ten minute stop for the view of the ocean on a dirt road that the lunch waitress told me about. Another half-hour jaunt to a secluded beach. The kids marched on, with my smallest one strapped to my chest like a war medal. We used a port-a-potty.
I tried to warn my wife. I honestly did. An adventure day is not something you just happen upon. It’s something you prepare for.
Later that day, right before the air and space museum which was still open for another forty-five minutes, my wife fell asleep in the car. The kids and I let her nap.
Pina Coladas on the beach. I’m just saying that was a possibility on this wonderful Thursday.
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Previously Published on Hossman-at-Home
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