Ten Days with Dad: Part II

I am a creature of habit, and rely on routine and strict schedules in order to remain sane.  But this need did not develop by way of nature. By nature, I’m the most disorganized, scatter-brained fool on the planet.  Flat out, I can’t keep track of my own stuff.  Never have been able to.  I’m what they call a “big picture” kind of person, and the details of just about everything slip through my fingers.  And when I went off to the Air Force Academy, I realized that this little quirk of mine was going to get me thrown out of school if I didn’t do something about it.  I remember in basic training I kept leaving my cover (hat) under my chair at meal times (which we ate sitting on the front 2/3 of our chair, bolt upright, staring at the little eagle at the top of our plate, chewing no more than seven times, and a lot of other ridiculous bullshit) and was constantly having to go back to the table to retrieve it.  The first time one of our cadre (trainers) told me that if I did it again, he was going to make sure I did physical training until I puked.

That should have been enough to not do it again, right?

At the end of the very next meal, halfway out of the chow hall, all us basics cadets lined up like stinking, terrified ducks readying ourselves for the post-meal “training” session, I realized the very empty feeling in my hand. 

No cover. 

I did a quick about-face and half ran back to the table, to which I arrived just as the cadre was pulling my hat out from under the chair where I had been seated.  He had to read it twice, just to make sure he was reading the little name tag correctly.  Because there was absolutely no way, no WAY, anyone would be that stupid. 

I heard him mutter, “Oh, dude, are you freaking kidding me?” 

It was at that point he looked up and saw me standing there, petrified.  He scoffed, grinned, and said, “Welch, you’re dead.  I mean…dead.”

Seriously.  What the hell?  The guy thought I was TRYING to piss him off.  So, I spent some time in what they called the “gig pit,” where they just yell at you a lot and make you do a bunch of pushups and what not.  Looking back on it, it wasn’t that big of a deal.  But at the time, it was the biggest deal in the world.  So, I forced myself into this insane need for routine.  Because if I do everything the same way, every day, I won’t miss anything.  I’ve been at it for so long that I’ve come to depend on it and get all weird if my routine is disrupted.  I start losing things and getting angrier and angrier at myself.  I even get kind of depressed and anxious.  I guess I got institutionalized, like that old dude in the Shawshank Redemption.  One of these days I’ll forget to put the pudding cup in the sack lunch I pack every day (the contents of which have been the same for at least five years, the same sandwich made exactly the same way with all the other accompanying contents packed in exactly the same manner) and someone will have to cut me down from the rafters.

“Welch was here.”

As one might imagine, last week my usual routine was seriously disrupted.  So the first thing I did, I mean, the VERY FIRST THING I did with the girls after we got home from IHOP that first morning, was sit down and write out what our routine was going to be.

“Why are we doing this?” asked Shay.

“Because if we don’t, I’ll freak out.  I promise.  Trust me.  You want Dad on a schedule.”

“Uuuh…okay.”

Last time I mentioned the point system.  Well three of the five points earned each day were basically just points for adhering to the schedule, the other two were points for chores.  And really, they did pretty well.  There was very little begging to do something that went outside the routine, because they knew the response would be a disproportionately strong “no.”  Their chores for the final two days were both the easiest and hardest points they have ever earned:

Don’t make a mess.

They sort of managed that one.

So the rest of the ten days went off basically without a hitch.  There was one night, however, that didn’t fit into my sanity routine, and I nearly lost it.  Their school had their annual “carnival.”  Mo had been reminding us of this for months.  Even quizzing us periodically.

“Do you guys remember what’s happening on the 16^th?”

“Yes, Mo.  The carnival.”

The reason for her excitement wasn’t the DJ playing epically terrible pre-teen pop to bouncing, sweating kids, or the five dollar face painting, or even the ten dollar hotdog-soda-cotton candy meal (which I burped up for the next two days).  It was because there was to be a music program, and each class was going to be performing. 

The girls’ priorities are much different than mine were at that age.

So in that time leading up to the carnival, Amy and I both just absent-mindedly said that yes, we realized the date, and yes, we’d be there.

It was Mo who first put two and two together and realized that Amy was going to be out of town for it.

“So Dad, can we go?”

“Yes.”

“Even though Mom can’t go?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to miss my class music recital!”

“Ooooh, no!  Not for the world!”

Dammit.  There went the routine.

“Yaaay!  Can Aunt Jodie and Uncle Larry (our neighbors) come?”

“I don’t know, we can ask.”

“Yaaay!”

 So Jodie, I think out of pity for me, agreed to meet us there so she could see Mo’s music recital.

The carnival was insane.  I mean, packed with all kinds of people, none of which I knew.  So I sat at a lunchroom table, by myself, watching the kids dance as I quietly ate cotton candy.

After reading that last sentence, I realize how creepy that sounds.  Or sad.  A tubby dude eating cotton candy by himself at a lunchroom table.  Man.  I guess not much has changed since grade school after all.

Around seven o’clock, the DJ took a break between Justin Beiber and Taylor Swift (are ALL of that woman’s songs about breaking up with dudes?  Wasn’t she a country singer or something? Dating her must be like holding a burlap sack full of feral cats.  I momentarily considered banging my head as hard as I could against the table just to end the misery of “never ever ever getting back together,” the words of which every little girl seemed to know) to announce the music recital was beginning shortly in the gym.  So groaning parents pried themselves up and out from between the stubby lunchroom tables and low attached benches and made their way, sweating, grumpy, and full of indigestible hot dogs, toward the gym. 

God it was hot in there.  Which brought about a lovely aromatic mixture of a decade’s worth of grimy kids playing scooter tag with what was probably hot dog farts that hung right at adult nose level.

Yum.

About that time Jodie showed up and we stood in the corner to watch the kids sing their songs.

Each class sung three short little tunes.  The music teacher was extremely jolly and enthusiastic.  This was very different from my grade school music teacher, who was a grumpy old lady that had been wearing the same wig for thirty years.  She was especially famous for stopping music programs in mid song, turning to the parents and scolding them in that I’m-about-to-cry-so-my-voice-is-warbling-like-a-sheep tone for talking while the kids were singing.  “Please be quiet!  These children have worked very hard on these songs!  If you must talk, GO OUTSIDE!”  I vividly remember the shocked and disbelieving looks on the parents’ faces in the audience after receiving this tongue lashing from Mrs. Fankhouser.

Well, this music teacher apparently didn’t have any problem with people talking, which they did, a lot, throughout the performance. I kind of wish Mrs. Fankhouser had been there to get them all in line.

As always, the Kindergartener’s squeaked out the obligatory “wheels on the bus” and what not.  Everyone clapped.  The first graders did pretty much the same thing, but with the token ADD kid just looking around the whole time and picking his nose in the back row, stopping his nasal foraging every so often to sing a line then eat whatever was on the end of his finger. 

The second graders, Mo’s class, sang songs that were all “in a different language!”  Everyone “oooh”ed and “aaaah”ed at this announcement.  I quickly realized it was bullshit, because the first song, some border-line racist Japanese song about rain, was mostly in English.  And apparently second grade is when little choreographed hand motions and squat down stand up moves were introduced to the program.  So that was special.  The second song was “Frere Jacques,” and at the “din dan don” part, the kids rocked back and forth like bells. 

All I could think was that the French even screw up “ding ding dong.”

I don’t really remember the third song, mostly because I was getting so hot I thought I’d pass out.  So after the fourth graders played honking songs on their recorders (with the musically challenged kids banging away on xylophones) Jodie, the girls, and I made our exit from the gym.

We stayed for a little bit longer in the cafeteria so the girls could dance some more to asinine songs.  Jodie and I people watched for a while.  There’re some interesting folks at a school carnival. 

When we got to the house, I found Jodie there waiting in the driveway.  I opened the door, began to thank Jodie for coming to the carnival and helping me out, but instead of making a quick get-away she marched the girls inside and started to draw their bath.  I told her that I could do it, but she just shook her head at me, told me that she had it, and that I should call Larry, who was back at the house (smart enough to avoid the carnival altogether) and have a beer. 

So I did. 

And Jodie did me a huge solid by getting the girls bathed, putting them into pajamas, brushing their hair, and reading to them while they went to sleep. 

As I sat on a chair in the garage with Larry, drinking a homebrew and looking up at the lighted window of the girls’ room while Jodie read to them, I realized how tired I was and how much I appreciated good neighbors.  I nearly fell asleep on that chair, watching the cool evening sky soften and enjoying my few moments of sanity.  Routine be damned, that was a good night. 

The next day my parents arrived from Kansas City to spend the weekend with us.  They wanted to get to know the girls a little better, which was great for all of us.  I think my mom was a little worried about me down here in Texas all alone with two little girls, but after a while I think she realized I had it, for the most part, under control.  We spent the weekend not doing much, just eating a lot and hanging out around.  The girls spent most of the weekend in and out of the house, playing with the neighbor kids.  We have a great neighborhood for that, full of similarly-aged kids who seem to really like the girls.  One of the neighbors is a boy roughly Mo’s age, and she’s “totally in love” with him. 

Gross.

I guess it’s natural and all, but I still glance sideways at the eight year old towhead when he comes to the door and asks if Mo’s home.  But she sprints past me and they disappear into the front yard with the other kids in all innocence.  Now what’s REALLY funny is how drama-filled their little romance is.  Every so often Mo will come in from playing with this kid and his siblings sniffling and pouting.  When I ask her what’s wrong, invariably it has something to do with the boy, whether it be that he isn’t paying attention to her or that he said something she construed as mean to her.  So I gave the usual speech about how little boys are too stupid to be nice to the girls they have crushes on, and usually when they tease or are flat out mean, it’s because they have a crush too.  Well, one day, that’s all she needed to hear, because she marched back outside and told him that “if you like me, then act like it!  Don’t be stupid and mean, or I won’t like you anymore!”  

YES!!!

I told her to stow that notion away in her little satchel of knowledge for when she’s older.  She looked at me with her usual look of bemusement, shook her head at me, and walked back outside to play.       

My parents left Monday, May 20^th.  They drove through Oklahoma City that morning.  That should ring a bell, because that’s the day that bad EF-5 tornado ripped the place up.  They were ahead of the weather so they didn’t see anything, but man, the girls and I were worried about them and we didn’t stop until they were back in Kansas City.

Amy came home that Wednesday, marking the end of Ten Days with Dad.  We were all extremely happy to have her home, but I must say, with the help of good neighbors, good parents and extremely good kids, that I did a pretty good job overall.

 That night I told Amy to dig out her roller-coaster suit and get ready to go to Wonderland, Amarillo’s own amusement park, because the girls had definitely earned their fifty points.

Ten Days with Dad: Part I

 

At 4:15 on Sunday morning, Amy and I gently plucked the sleeping girls from their beds, placed them in the back seat of the car, and drove through the sleeping pre-dawn streets of Amarillo to Rick Husband Airport, where Amy was meeting a group of honor’s students to begin their ten day trip to Scotland.  A few minutes into the drive, a sleepy question came from the backseat.

“Dad, why are the stoplights flashing?”

“Because it’s early yet, and they’re sleeping too.  When they wake up, they’ll begin changing colors like normal.”

“Oh.”

We continued on in silence until we pulled up to the terminal.  Amy got out, gave the girls’ kisses, and was off with her roller bag.  We watched until she disappeared behind the automatic doors. 

And so began Ten Days with Dad.

 As we slowly pulled away, the girls were stirring in the backseat.  Shay began to whimper a little.  “I’m going to miss Mommy,” she said.

“I know, me too.  But we’re gonna have fun, I promise.  Don’t worry, she’ll be back before you know it.”

I think I was talking more to myself than to the girls.

After a few minutes, Mo said, “I’m hungry.”  I had promised the girls that we would go to breakfast that morning, but I hadn’t anticipated that they would want to go immediately.

“You sure you don’t want to go home first and take a nap?  Are you sure-sure?  I mean, not much is open yet.  Only fast food joints and IHOP, that kind of thing.”  I was hoping beyond all hopes that they would just want to go home and sleep for a while longer.  But no such luck.

“No, we want to go now.  I’m hungry.”

“Okay, okay, but we have to take you home first to get changed.  You can’t go in just your pajamas.”

“Why not?”

I thought about my answer for a minute.  I imagined what I would have thought if someone would have walked into an IHOP at 4:30 in the morning with two small, sleepy, pajama-clad kids, who obviously weren’t biologically related to that person.  I’m pretty sure I would have made a mental note to check the Amber Alerts that day.  I decided to be honest.

“Because people will think I stole you girls from your bed and am taking you across the country or something.”

A calculated risk to say such a thing, but I was tired and couldn’t think of a better lie.  It paid off though.

“Dad…you’re funny,” said Mo.

“Yeah,” Shay affirmed.

“Okay.  Glad you think so.  But we have to change.”

At IHOP, the girls were pretty much asleep in their breakfasts.  That is, until Mo spilled the entire contents of her hot chocolate (it was cool by the time, so no McDonalds-esque hot coffee lawsuits in my future) all over her breakfast.  She was trying to put the plastic top over the Styrofoam cup.  It wouldn’t snap down over the lip, so she stood up and leaned on it with all her might.  Before I could say, “don’t do that,” the cup crumpled beneath her weight, and brown sticky liquid shot out in all directions.

It was epic.

The commotion caught the attention of a few drunks still up from the previous night, who clapped.  Mo stared down at her drowned happy-faced pancake, its whipped-cream grin slowly melting away.

When we were walking in, I caught a bit of a worker dispute between who I suppose was the manager (Jillian) and a particularly animated and flamboyant server.

“I ain’t seating any more tables tonight, Jillian, not another one.  It’s Tony’s turn, I haven’t had me a break in like a million years, and he ain’t been doin’ shit tonight, Jillian, just callin’ his skanky girlfriend!  So no!”

I thought this was odd, but hadn’t thought much about it.  That is, until the monumental spill.  In that strange moment when everyone is motionless, just watching the spill progress to the ends of the table, arms out and off the surface, open mouthed, trying to comprehend what had just happened, I saw the angry server march toward our table.

Uh-oh.

But the guy saw the girls, smiled, and said, “Oh, baby, don’t you worry about it at all.  Terrell is here, and I’ll clean it up lickety-split, don’t you worry about it at all!  Now don’t cry, baby girl…anyone ever tell you how pretty you are?”

He got a mop, a crap load of napkins, and another hot chocolate for Mo.  Shay just kept eating her cheese omelet, completely un-phased by it all.

Needless to say, Terrell got a big tip.

 I have found a way to keep the girls in line.  At least, so far.  I keep an incredibly strict schedule and am constantly calling out time.  Maybe it’s from my Air Force Academy days.  Calling “minutes” in the hallway before formation.  But I found it works pretty damn well.  Each minute that lingers past a phase of the evening (dinner, bath time, etc) it cuts into desert time and reading time (I’m reading Harry Potter to them, which they are loving, even though I’m halfway through the book and Shay asked me tonight who Hagrid was, so I’m not sure they’re following it very well).  Anyway, it works.  I’m also shamelessly bribing them with a trip to the amusement park.  I told them they have to earn five points a day each in order to go to Wonderland when Amy gets home. 

Jackpot.

Three points a day for behavior, two points for chores.  Man, they are ON it.  I don’t know how long their preoccupation with points will last, but I’m loving it right now.  They’ve been GREAT.  So good, in fact, that they compliment me even when I don’t deserve it.

Case in point, two nights ago at dinner.

I decided to be Father of the Year and actually cook something new, what I supposed would be a welcome deviation from my four-meal repertoire.  A pasta dish with ham, onions, garlic, and peas in a cream sauce.  I served it up, pretty pleased with myself, and…

They didn’t touch it.

I asked them to give it a grade.

They looked at each other and Mo said, “Oh, Dad.  A+++!”

“But you don’t seem to like it.  You haven’t eaten any of it.”

“Well…but…it was a good try, and we like it because you made it.”

FIVE POINTS TO GRYFFINDOR!

That’s the way to suck up, kids.  Well done.  This point system thing is working!  And they even compliment me in the morning when I pull their hair up into haphazard pony tails (told them a week ago that when mom was gone, they were getting pony or pig tails, no exceptions) and they look nuts.  When I pick them up from school it’s sticking up and out and every which way but in the hair tie, which is usually just hanging off the side of their head for dear life.  Yesterday in the car, their hair in this unkempt state, Shay said, “A teacher asked me today if my mom was out of town.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes, that my Dad was watching me.”

“And what did she say?”

“I don’t know.  Nothing.  She just said ‘I thought so.’”

“Oh.  Well, next time you see her, tell her that she’s welcome to come over in the morning and fix your hair herself if she wants.”

“Uh…okay.”

Looking back on that, I better tell her not to actually say that to the teacher.  She probably will.

Time to hit the sack.  The girls are asleep upstairs and I decided to take these few minutes to write a post.  Taking a little longer because the “e” on my keyboard doesn’t want to work, so if there are a bunch of missing “e”s, that’s why.  But one more little story I have to tell.

 We live in a pretty cool old house, but with an old house comes “character.”  One of these gems is the fact that most of the upstairs windows are in bad shape, and there are a lot of torn screens that I haven’t gotten around to fixing.  Because of this, in the spring the upstairs window sills become the ideal place for birds to wedge in between the torn screens and the storm windows to nest and lay eggs.  One such spot is the upstairs bathroom window.  A big fat mourning dove had decided to nest there and has been sitting on, what we supposed were, eggs.  But it had been sitting there for so long, we were wondering if any of the eggs were viable.  Well, turns out, one was, and yesterday we saw a hatchling lying at the bottom of the nest while the mom was out getting food.  The girls were watching the little bird, and I went downstairs to begin dinner.  After a little while, I heard panicked shrieks coming from upstairs, followed by thunderous footfalls coming down the steps.

“What’s going on up there?  What’s wrong?”

  What came next was an account of pure horror.

“We were watching the baby bird, and the momma was gone, and then, uh…and then another bird, a brown one, came flying in, and…and…”

“And what?”

“And ate the baby bird!!!!”

“WHAT?!?”

“Yeah,” said Shay.  “It was just sitting there, cheeping, and we were saying how cute it was, and then this thing came flying in and grabbed it and pecked at it and now there’s blood on the window and the mean bird is still there!”

“Good Lord, really?”

“Yeeees!”

So I run upstairs into the bathroom and sure enough, there’s blood smeared on the window, and this pissed off looking brown bird sitting in the nest, just staring at us. 

“That’s it!  That’s that bird!  Go away you meanie!”

Shay then began tapping at the window to try and scare it off.

But it wasn’t skert.

The goddamned thing started pecking back at the window and flapping its wings.

This sent the girls screaming from the room…and honestly, me too.  I mean, WHAT THE HELL?  And when it was pecking, it was leaving little blood smears on the window, I presume from its fresh kill.  So I told the girls to stay away from it, that it was protecting its new nest.

“DUH, Dad!”

Later Shay was talking about it to her sister, and reminding her of all the blood with an evil little smile on her face.

“Did you see the blood?  Did you?”

“Stop it, Shay!”

“It was all over!”

“Sissy, stop it!  Daaaad!”

Me running in:  “What?”

“Tell sissy to stop being so dark.”

“Dark?”

“Yes.  Dark.”

“Very apt word.  Where did you learn it?”

“You.”

“Oh.”

“Because mom says that you’re pretty dark sometimes.”

“I guess I am.  Shay, stop tormenting your sister.”

“But the blood!”

“Seriously, enough.”

“Okay.”

Shay is gonna write horror stories one day.

Spring Break (Part II): Big Family

Spring Break (Part II): Big Family

Vacation is different with kids. 

I understand the banality of this statement.  As a matter of fact, I sat here for a number of minutes trying to think of something, anything, better to say.  But really, that’s about the sum of it.  The things we do, the people we see…the focus of each and every activity…is different.  Part of the reason for this is obvious and did not come to me as a surprise.  It is no longer about me and my “entertainment,” whether it is a camping excursion or a trip to the beach or just time to decompress at home with the television.  The focus has switched from me to the kids.  This isn’t an epiphany.  I knew that would be the case a long time ago.  I knew this when I saw how stressed out my folks got on vacation when I was a kid.  I actually remember telling myself, after a particularly long trip to the gulf coast, that vacations for parents must suck.  My parents didn’t really do anything except listen to us want things.  An overpriced tourist tee shirt with a wildly inappropriate slogan on it (something about eating a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle and how I was “slippery when ‘et”).  A lanyard with a shark’s tooth on it.  Sand dollars in a bag.  Some we got, some we didn’t.  And I was always on the lookout for one of those switchblade combs.  I don’t know why.  I mean, for most of the summer I had a buzz cut (yes, a little fat kid with a buzz cut on an Alabama beach…one of about ten million on the Redneck Riviera).  Yet I couldn’t get over the idea of having one.  I kept imagining going up to some kid, whipping it out and brandishing it in his face.  Then I’d hit the button so the comb would snap into place, but turned so the other kid would see it edge on, momentarily making him think it actually was a knife.  And then I’d laugh, casually turn it so he could see the comb teeth, and cooly run it through my hair (which didn’t exist) then walk away. 

Stupid. 

I guess I thought having a switchblade comb would make me a badass or someone from that movie The Outsiders. 

Stay golden, Tubby Pony Boy. 

Anyway, I also remember my folks actually spending time with us and seeming to be, for the most part, happy about it.  They never really got to do anything they wanted to.  They didn’t go out to dinner by themselves, at least not that I can remember.  They didn’t buy themselves anything from the “cool” shops along the beach.  They just walked slowly alongside us, alternately saying “yes” and “no” to our immediate and transient wants, seeming a little aloof about it all.    

After a long day on the beach and walking around in town, we’d get back to the hotel room exhausted, ready to pass out even before the sun went down.  My brother, sister and I would sit in the air conditioning and watch a movie on the hotel’s free HBO, sandy yet comfortable, nursing mild sunburns or jellyfish stings, indifferent to the view of the graying ocean beyond the window behind us. 

We were quiet. 

And Mom and Dad would be outside on the deck, looking at the waves.

How in the HELL could that have been fun?     

Rather than get into a drawn out (and honestly, probably pretty boring) chronology of our vacation, I’ll hit the heavy hitters where funny or at least eye-opening experiences occurred.

1.  Free Breakfast

At the crack of dawn that first morning, the girls were bouncing off the walls at the idea of the breakfast waiting for them downstairs.  I don’t know what they were picturing.  Somehow they got it into their minds that it was going to be the most spectacular feast ever to be lain upon a table.  We tried to tell them that there really wasn’t anything that special about hotel breakfasts.  But it didn’t matter.  They had seen that damn waffle iron sitting in the little dining room the night before and were just chomping at the bit to put it to use. 

Before groggily heading down to the food, I asked if they were excited about going up into the mountains, as tubing at Winter Park was that day’s activity.  They shrugged, said sure, then told me to hurry up because they wanted to see the waffle iron. 

The grand results of mighty tectonic forces that have been molding the earth’s surface for eons upon eons? The way each peak is a monument to how truly special and unique our planet is?  To stand humbled and dwarfed among God’s vast beauty, to feel frighteningly insignificant yet overwhelmingly grateful to have a place on this earth, at this time, given this life…

Or…

A waffle iron?

They chose the waffle iron.

The girls waited, undeterred, twenty minutes for the family who had arrived just before us to figure out the iron.  I mean, I don’t want to go on some grumpy rant here about how dumb people are, because it only makes me look like an elitist creep, but…Oh, God, people are so very, very dumb.  I mean, come on.  Fill the cup with batter, pour it on the iron at the center, close the lid, AND TURN THE GODDAMNED THING OVER!!!!  I watched a fat woman in a dirty sweatshirt stare at this thing for three full minutes with her mouth open, just wondering why the counter hadn’t started yet.  I guess the growing amount of smoke wasn’t enough of a hint that she had done something wrong.  And the instructions are printed and posted right next to the thing.  So I said,

“You need to flip the iron over before it will start.”

  “Huh?”

“Flip the thing over and the counter will start.”

She proceeded to open the lid and pry at the half-burned waffle with a fork, apparently believing I had meant that she needs to flip the actual waffle over.

“No…no, you have to…here, let me.”  I closed the lid, rotated the iron, and the timer started.

“Ooooooh, okay.  Thanks.”

“No problem.”

After two minutes of everyone staring at the single breakfast machine, grumpy and hungry, the beeper goes off, and she’s stumped again.

“Open it up, take out the waffle.”

“Huh?”

Finally she figured it out, but then we had to go through the same thing with four other members of her brood, who had apparently learned nothing from the previous family member.  As I’m getting more and more pissed and the girls are getting hungrier and hungrier, I realized how very primal this whole little hotel waffle maker experience is.  Like a watering hole on the Serengeti or something.  It is the great socio-economic equalizer.  Doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, how important you believe you are…you’re eventually going to be a schmuck standing in line waiting for a fat lady in a grungy Arkansas Razorback sweatshirt to figure out a damned waffle iron.

Lessons learned from this:  Kids love breakfast; they don’t give a shit about geology or tectonic forces; and some grad student should write a sociology thesis on hotel waffle makers.

2.  Function versus beauty

In short, kids don’t care one bit about beauty or existential experiences.  Amy and I are fine just drinking a beer and looking at the mountains.  But the girls…well, they think the mountains are great, but what can they do with them?  How can they play with them?  To a kid, the vacation has to be functional.  They have to physically do something.  So we planned some activities, which went well.  When we went tubing up at Winter Park, the girls were bored out of their skulls driving up to the mountains, but when they found they could slide down them at 50 mph on tubes, well, they liked them just fine.  By contrast, I was over the whole tubing thing after about four runs, at which point I wanted to go into the bar, get some food, and just…chill…out.  A moment of peace and quiet.  And it was at this point I remembered my parents standing out on the deck behind our hotel on the beach.

 Just…staring. 

They were having fun because they weren’t doing anything at all.  Nothing.  And it was everything they hoped it could be.  In six days of vacation, we kids took up 5.95 days of vacation; they got 0.05 days.  But it was enough for them.  And oddly, Amy and I found that it was enough for us as well.

3.  Big Family

In the last post, the girls were about to meet their “Big Family.”  We thought we were using this as a term of endearment, a testament to the love we have for the people we were visiting.  Everyone was uncle and aunt so-and-so or cousin whomever.  And as much as our affection for these people was the driving force for our phrasing, it was also just plain laziness.  “Cousin Maya” puts the whole thing to bed and does not require any further explanation.  However, if we were to introduce someone simply by their first name, the girls would demand to know that person’s entire genealogy.  And if we told them all the ins and outs of our friendships, who was who, who met who when, whose kid is whose, etc etc etc, they’d only barely grasp it and then ask the same questions each time that person was mentioned.  So “Cousin Maya” it is.  The girls were STOKED to meet all these new people, which they did throughout the week.  We went to the zoo with a friend and her two little ones, which was a lot of fun.  But I did have the realization that every single situation in the kids’ lives is somehow related and compared to a Disney movie.  So, in the zoo, you guessed it, they found every single animal they saw in The Lion King and were mesmerized by them.  I mean, of course the lion.  Who wouldn’t care to see a lion?  But a warthog?  The girls were blown away by this wild pig just walking around, giggling at it and singing the hula song “he’s a big pig you can be a big pig too! Yup yup yup.”  But in any animal that didn’t have a line in that movie they weren’t in the bit least interested.  The primate house was a hit, the bird house just smelled bad.  All in all, if you’re in Denver with kiddos, I recommend the zoo, it’s pretty good.  Not all sad like some. 

As the trip went on, and as we hung out at friends’ houses where we were catching up and letting the kids run around and play, I realized that as the kids were having the time of their lives…and so were we.

You see, because Amy and I do not have children of our own, before the girls came to live with us, there was always a bit of a disconnect between us and our friends with kids.  It was simply that we were at different points in our lives.  We were still in no-kids-yet mode, wanting to go out and do adult things until the wee hours of the morning, where our friends, well, they couldn’t.  They’d jump through hoops to find babysitters and what not, and we always had a great time, but still…we were just missing something.  They were fine just hanging out with us in their barely managed chaos that was a house full of children, able to tune out the noise and screaming.  Before the girls came, we weren’t able to tune that out.  We weren’t completely at ease in that scenario.  It was great to see our friends, but it was just different.  Our vacations to see our friends revolved around children and their needs, even though we didn’t have any. 

Well, now we get it.

It was the first time where we could comfortably hang out with our friends in the midst of screaming, roughhousing kids, keeping one ear on the conversation and one ear on the bizarre world of children playing.  And you know what?  It was relaxing!  Because when the kids are together, they kind of turn into a pack of feral children, raising themselves, attending to their own needs, and we just have to make sure they don’t go all Lord of the Flies and begin killing one another.  And that, I found, is the beauty of a bunch of people with kids hanging out together.  You just set them loose in some basement room, where a startlingly complex child society takes hold with its own social norms and everything.  I mean, one could walk down there, see a pack of kids all dressed in weird tribal clothing and loin cloths dancing around a fire and we’d just say, “hey, be careful” and head up to stand in the kitchen and drink beer.  Occasionally some sweaty kid will come running up and ask a cryptic question like, “can we get down the vacuum cleaner and have a bunch of pennies?”  The answer to this is usually, “Well, why…I mean…whatever.  Just don’t get hurt.”  Because if you actually engage this question, nine times out of ten you’ll get some halting, out-of-breath explanation that doesn’t make any sense anyway.  So just let ‘em go, make sure they don’t drop a rock on the kid with glasses, and retreat to the kitchen for some long-awaited grown up conversation.

We had such a party the last night of our trip.  Amy and I thought having a good old fashioned white trash hotel party would be a hell of a lot of fun, so our friends Kipp and Trayce came down with their three kids and rented a room as well.  Other friends with their kids came by at different points too.  We got pizza, Taco Bell, McDonalds, and a shit-ton of Keystone Ice. 

It was magic. 

Kids running around half naked and screaming between different pockets of the same big party (half of the people were usually in the pool while the other half were upstairs talking), all of us having a really good time.  Probably my favorite part of the entire event was Kipp’s daughter Kennedy.  She’s the youngest of three, and just trudges around silently, watching, waiting, smiling.  In the pool she would just sit in her floaty thing and kick around as silently as a duck.  Occasionally someone would ask if she was okay and she’d just grin, turn, and kick away.  When she’d begin to say something, I’d tell everyone to be quiet, that Kennedy was about to actually speak.  Then she’d just smile and walk away.  Now when she does talk, it’s assertive.  She’d get knocked down from time to time, but usually she’d just get back up, smile, and keep at whatever it was the other kids were doing.  Other times she would say, “HEY!” and that was enough for everyone to stop and immediately address her needs.  Pretty good way to operate really.  Don’t say much, but when you do, by God make it count.

All in all, it was a fantastic spring break for all of us.  I doubt the girls have ever had so many people make a fuss over them at once, and being total attention hogs, they loved every single second of it.  Amy and I definitely grew a little and had a nice reconnection with all our old friends.  It’s like we’re in “the club” now, and while it’s nice for me, I know Amy was having a hard time with that aspect, and I believe this was her best spring break in a long, long time.