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Dads today work too much, everyone
knows it. It is not like we go down into the mines to load tons of
ore into little carts pulled by ponies. More like we drive to
airports fly off to exotic places like Fayetteville, Tennessee to
convince people that they have problems that they didn't know they
had. Then we convince them to put tons of their money into little
carts that we pull back to our offices.
My son asked me how many hours I work
and I couldn't answer him, "If you count driving to the airport,
sitting on airplanes, checking into hotel rooms and doing email
late at night I would guess 60 to 80 hours a week. If you count
standing in front of a partner convincing them to sell lots of our
stuff maybe 6 hours a week." Either way I am away from home a lot
more than I want to be.
I am not the only guy that lives like this. I am often amused how often a guy in a bar
will bring it up to me, I am not sure if talking to a guy in a bar
counts as working, if it does then sign me up for another 20 hours a
week. The conversation goes something like, "You can't have
quality time with your kids. With your kids Quantity is Quality."
What they mean is that you can have quality time at work. Do the
things that provide the most value first, leaving the unimportant
stuff to the end or maybe never get around to the unimportant stuff.
It doesn't work that way with your
kids, the seemingly unimportant stuff is often the most important.
It isn't the trip to Disneyland that creates the most important
memories. It is looking at a butterfly together. The problem is you
can't plan butterflies. You can schedule meetings, respond to the
most important emails, take a later fight out, but butterfly
planning is impossible. I am amused because we are having this
discussion in the bar or in a hotel restaurant so obviously we are
not spending "quantity time" with our kids. We are not
tucking them in, reading to them, or even sitting at the dinner
table with them.
With your kids you have to be there.
This is especially hard for dads to do with their daughters.
I try very hard not to be sexist but my daughter still likes to go
shopping, she likes to cuddle up with my wife and watch design
shows. We have two kids, a boy and a girl. Two parents
= two kids. When we do one on one time we gravitate toward
the things we like and away from the the things we don't like. I
don't like design shows, Cheryl doesn't like video arcades.
Before Matthew turned 13 I spent more time with him and Cheryl
spent more time with Katie. Now that Matthew is a teenager he
spends more time with girls and his friends but Katie still spends
more time with her Mom. She will spend time with me if I'll buy
her something, let her stay up late, give her free TV time, or
drive her some where.
Cheryl and I both see this as a
problem, so of course Cheryl fixes it. She finds an Indian Princess
tribe that does four campouts a year, just the dads and their
daughters. It is a great tribe since the guys are all laid back and
none of us want to win any medals. We don't care if we have the
nicest
banner, or win the chili cooking contest. We are all very busy and
want to spend "Quantity time" with our daughters in the hope that
some of it will translate into Quality time. Unlike some of the
other tribes we don't have weekly meetings to plan out stuff, mostly
because most of us are not in town during the week. If I see any of
the fathers during the week it is at the Dallas Fort Worth airport,
not sitting in the YMCA conference room designing the tribes' table
cloth. We do get together once a month at one of our homes but I
don't think we have ever discussed anything about the camping trips.
We don't talk about the camping trips
with our wives around because they get upset about letting the
girls hike in their pajamas or drying their shoes over the fire.
We have trained the girls that "What happens on the campout
stays at the campout." This has to do with the amount of
cookies we let them eat or the barefoot hikes that would drive mom
crazy but seem perfectly fine to us dads.
I think there is something genetic
about how men and women raise their kids. Guys will let them climb
to the top of the jungle gym, women will teach them to wash up before
eating. Guys make their kids wash up before eating but really only
so we don't get in trouble with our wives. Maybe the idea is that
men are here to make them strong so they can survive in a tough
world. Women are here to make sure that enough kids survive so
the population doesn't drop below the number needed to keep the
human race going.
The campout starts on Friday with
check in from 3:00pm to 9:00pm. Most of us show up late because we
are flying back into town from Fayetteville Tennessee or someplace
just as exciting. If you don't fly a lot, flying on
Friday is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer - it feels
so good when you stop. A Friday flight means that you will be
crammed into a middle seat, leave late, and arrive later at the gate
that is the farthest away from where you parked your car. I land,
struggle with my bags, slug my way to my car which means a twenty minute
walk to the terminal van, a twenty minute wait for bus that comes
“every ten minutes”, a scenic tour of the other terminals and
then another 10 minute schlep to my car, followed by a 10 mile
drive home that takes 45 minutes.
I get home from the airport much
later than I wanted and try to be as upbeat as possible when I see
Katie anxiously waiting at the door for me. I unpack my shaving
kit from my business suitcase and toss it into old army parachute
bag which I use for these camp outs for a bunch of reasons. The
first is because I love that old bag and Cheryl hates it so she
won't let me use it for anything else. Second I don't care if it
smells like smoke at the end of the weekend. Last because it
expands , so that the nicely folded clothes that Cheryl has packed
for Katie that by the end of the weekend will turn into the smoky,
soggy, bundle of clothes that I will carelessly toss back
into the bag on Sunday morning will fit. I'll be able to toss the
bag on my shoulder, dump it in the SUV without giving
it a second thought. We pack up enough "pogey bait" to
last a couple of weeks . Pogey bait is military slang for candy,
ice cream or sweets in general. I don't know why it is called
that, but even my kids know if you're tossing a couple boxes of
candy bars into a parachute bag it is called pogey bait. I look at
the clock, it is around 6:30 pm . I don't want to slug my way
though Dallas traffic so we wait a half an hour. We drive the
three hours to the camp, stopping about ten minutes out to get a
take out pizza which is good for dinner and breakfast.
I know it sounds funny that we show
up late on Friday night, but we all show up, which I think is an
important first step. There are a lot of guys wearing shirts that
have slogans like; "It is a wise father that knows his own
child - Bill Shakespeare." We all look like we have been
loading ore trucks all week or at least dragging them out of the
mine. Most of us look like we would rather be anywhere else. My
guess is we would all rather be cuddled up with our wives in our own
beds rather then in a sleeping bag for the weekend but we are here
and we hope that it will get us points with the two women that
matter most, our wives and our daughters.
We start to relax as soon as the fire
is burning and the kids have picked out the beds they will sleep
in. This is very important because friendships must be maintained
or renewed. There is some fatherly input as well since we all know
who snores, so some distance can be important. I am not throwing
stones here since my Indian name is, "Rolling Thunder"
which I hope is because I snore but you never know.
 Sitting around the fire on Friday
night we slowly start to decompress. We are not allowed to bring
alcohol so we normally drink Cafe Latte Espressos with a head of
steamed foam. The espresso are imported from Mexico,
Belgium, Australia, St. Louis, and Golden Colorado.
You also get a look at the
other kids and their dads. This can either be enlightening or
depressing depending on
 if it is your kid tossing expensive unused
paper plates directly from the package into the fire or if it is
somebody else's daughter doing it. The girls and some of the dads
give up around midnight and head off to get some sleep. The rest
of the dads stay up drinking espressos and seeing how much
junk we can randomly pull out of our brains. We don't talk about
work or family.
We talk about trivia, this weekend it is song titles
and which band sang them. Someone will name a song and someone
else will name the band. They could also throw out a bands name and one
of the guys will call out their top song or songs. I am terrible
at this and for the first twenty minutes I don't even understand
what we are doing. I stand there confused as I hear someone
call out "Come on Eileen?" Then the bored reply,
"Dexy's Midnight Runners. " Ok how about "Icicle
Works" an impressed, "Not bad, Birds Fly"
A quick " Lipps, Inc." Three people yell out
"Funkytown" then one of them says, "Double" Which
gets a groan and a quick "Captain of Her Heart". One of
the guys who I thought was asleep sings "867-5309" and before he can
finish the last three digits everyone except me and and one of the
girls that has gotten up and is sitting in her father's lap yells
out, "Tommy Tutone". The guy who was singing
says, "The Divinyls" it is too quickly answered with,
"I Touch Myself" This is followed by an apologetic "Der
Kommisar," The reply after a few seconds, "After the Fire"
with a follow on comment, "The flip side was "Nobody Else But You",
Peter Banks on keyboards, John Leach on bass and Ian Adamson on
drums. The little girl asks, "What is a flip side?"
Everyone laughs and I start to figure it out. Then
finally get it when someone calls out “Bad Moon Rising" and
the response is Credence Clearwater followed but a groan since it
was way too easy for this group. I turn to Tawn and say, ”Are we
calling out song titles and the bands that played them?” He
responds, “Yes, Tom for about the last twenty minutes.” then he
moves away from me. I hope he is moving to escape the smoke that has started to
blow our way but it could be because I am too stupid to stand next
to. In my defense they sometimes tossed out a line from a movie. The one that stuck with us all weekend was
the line from Deliverance, "You got uhh m-EYE-tee puhrtee
mouth, boy" In case you can not understand Georgian it is
what the toothless man in that movie said, "You got a mighty
pretty mouth, boy."
It is getting late and the rumbling
from the cabin reminds the rest of us that we had better get some
sleep. We also made the mistake of letting the guys that snore
get to sleep before us. We kind of put out the fire and then head
off to our bunks in the dark. The first challenge is to get
everything that the girls pulled of the bags and is strewn on top
of dad's sleeping bag put away. The next challenge is finding
a pair of ear plugs. You can not
sleep with the "Southlake Shooting Stars" without your
ear plugs or at least you will not get much sleep.
The sun comes up pretty early when
you have stayed up late drinking espressos. The cabin wakes
up in close to the reverse order that they went to sleep, but luckily
for me Katie likes to sleep. She is normally one of the first ones
in bed and the one of the last ones awake. She is up in plenty of
time for breakfast but we both know that she will not like any of
the food they are serving. It is the main reason that we pack so
much "pogey bait" She will survive, and does like walking
down to the mess hall with her friends.
The first activity is to go sliding
down a large slide into the lake. This requires her to change, for
some strange reason she decides to change in the top bunk. She tells
me, "No one can see me up here." I am unconvinced about her
invisibility but she is eight so I let it go.
 My daughter makes more than one dad uncomfortable. The next time
she goes to change I ask her to change in the bathroom. She explains
to me that, "The bathroom is dirty so she doesn't want to." I am not
sure what to do since changing in the top bunk doesn't seem to work
and it is hard to tell your daughter to ignore a dirty bathroom. One
of the other girls decided that they can change in one of the other
bedrooms and Katie agrees saying that, "Girls can see girls and boys
can see boys." I change in the dirty bathroom which given my army
background is not all that dirty.
We climb up the tower that has a 200
meter slide at the top and Katie asked
the lifeguard if we can go down together? The lifeguard looks at my 16 stone
body and decides, “No.” We will have to go down separately.
Katie goes first and I follow rapidly. I get pretty good distance
off the slide since mass x energy = distance. I get myself turned
back around and Katie is already swimming rapidly towards the
shore. I assume it is because she wants to go again, but it is
because she thinks the fish will attack her. I get her back in the
lake a couple of times after convincing her that there is no such
thing as lake sharks. I have a harder time when she swims over to me
and asks, “What do fish eat?” I tell her, “It depends some
are vegetarian...” and I am about to say and others are
carnivores. Listening to this in my mind just before it pops out
of my mouth I realize it will sound like some of the fish have the
appetites of prehistoric crocodiles. There is a very long pause
as I think this over then to fill the uncomfortable silence I
answer with most
inoffensive but not inaccurate statement saying, “Some are
vegetarian and some eat other fish. Katie immediately is headed
back toward shore since she is convinced her bare feet look
remarkably like a flounder.
The lake is no longer an option so we
hit the water slides. They start at the top of a hill and empty
into a nice clean,
 clear, chlorinated, fish free pool. (See I told
you this was a great Indian Princess tribe.) We have never stayed
in a tent and the only complaint we had was that the room was too
cold because someone had turned the air conditioning down to 67
degrees. Yes the camp does have water slides, three of them, as a
matter of fact. We go down the slowest one first and I am the only
dad in line so I feel a bit funny but it is about spending quantity
time with your daughter. We try all of the slides and do at least
two trips on each one. We do a lot more on the red slide which is
the fastest. I go down once facing forward on my stomach and the
lifeguard tells me very politely, "Sir, Please don't do that any
more." I, of course, agree and catch up to Katie who is smiling
because, “Papa, got yelled at!” The next time down I am laying on my
back as told. The water shoots up my nose and I swear the lifeguard
is laughing as I cough my way out of the pool. I can't be positive
about him but I am sure Katie is laughing at me.
After Lunch, which Katie doesn't find
to her liking, we go out canoeing and then we decide to go kayaking.
It is going pretty well. We are in a two man kayak but I forget to
tell Katie that a kayak is pretty unstable. She looks back at me and
then leans out to point to something or someone, I don't see what,
because we immediately over turn. I go over and the rail of the
kayak bangs me pretty good on the forehead.
 I
look for Katie and realize that she is under the kayak. She is
wearing a life preserver. You can breath under a kayak but I assume
she is going to be pretty scared since she might not know you can
breath under a kayak and also is very aware that the lake is filled
with carnivorous fish that would love to nibble on the sole looking
soles of her feet.
While I am still dazed from the bump
and thinking about how to get her out she comes swimming up next to me.
Completely calm she says to me, "That bump on your forehead is going to
hurt." I get the kayak flipped back over and then holding down the
opposite rail Katie climbs back in. I rest in the water for a minute
feeling the painfully growing bump and thinking, "How can I get back
into an unstable kayak with Katie up front without turning it over or
launching her in to the lake like a rock off a See-Saw. I finally
decide to mount it like it was a surf board so I slide up the back
filling it with water. We are both back in the kayak and I can
now paddle us to shore. Of course by now we have a pretty good audience
to watch me paddle our mostly submerged kayak to shore. I land it, pull
Katie off and try and drag my water filled kayak heavily up on to
shore. The thing must weigh a ton, my head hurts and I know that I am
going to have to hear or tell this story a painful number of times
around the fire tonight.
Craig tells me,
 "That bump on your
forehead is going to hurt." Tawn tries to cheer me up by
saying, "You must kayak a lot since you were able to get back in
so quickly. Katie explains to him that she was back in a lot faster than
I was. This gets me a "I tried to help you out, my friend."
look from Tawn.
We have to get going since it is our
time to go to the "Zip Line." It is the only scheduled activity and
if you miss your time slot you miss doing it. The girls would have
been happy to miss it since it is a bit scary. The "Zip
Line" is four cables that run about 200 meters from the top of a 25
meter high tower. It is so scary that all of the dads hope that the
girls will do it but are prepared to console them if they decide not
to. They put the girls in a harness that is attached to a couple of
pulleys that lock onto the cable. It is very safe but the first step
off is still a real leap of faith. Katie is very nervous, she walks
down to the tower like a death row convict walking "Dead man's
mile." The climb is even worse and I am torn between pushing her to
do it since I know she will like it and telling her she doesn't have
to do it. We strike the right balance and she pushes off sliding
down to the end and yells, "Can I do it again?" She
can't because it takes a long time to strap the kids in and the next
group has already shown up.
We
walk over to the "Adventure Climb" which she has
 to
get harnessed into. It is an obstacle course like pole, with a cargo
net at the bottom, a cable ladder which leads to a tire swing and
finally to a suspended telephone pole with rock climbing hand holds
bolted on. Katie scrambles up pretty quickly stopping once at the
top of the tire swing saying, "I can't go any farther?" The guy on
belay calls up to her, "Yes, you can." She figures he must be right
so climbs up the rest of the pole like an Army Ranger.
We go to dinner which Katie doesn't
like, as always, so more pogey bait for her and the other girls at
the fire tonight and more espressos for the dads. We only
have three logs left because the girls in the cabin next door have
burned all of the other wood we brought. You can not build a fire
with less than three logs and you can not build a very good fire
with only three logs. It is pretty smoky but I'm kind of happy
about that. I was getting pretty nervous about a camping trip that
involved water slides, espressos, complaints about
the air conditioning being set too low and so on. I figured that
coming home from a camping trip and not smelling like smoke would
raise some eyebrows, at least at my house. The girls keep putting
sticks in the fire and then pulling them out and waving them
around like sparkers which makes me nervous but Katie is in my lap
so I figure she is safe. She keeps trying to tell them to knock it
off, but since their dads are standing around the fire with us I
tell her to let the dads handle it.
The girls start to call it a night
but come back quickly and tell us that one of the bedrooms has a
"Musty smell." We figure out this is most likely from
one of the coolers that held the espresso leaking onto the
carpet. (I know! Camping in a cabin that has carpet in the
bedroom, go figure?) Of course, a bedroom filled with 40 year old
guys and 8 year old girls could have a musty smell for a multitude
of other reasons. We found a mouse in the cabin earlier which was
nursed to death by our daughters. We were nervous about it as soon
as the girls started nursing it. We knew it was in trouble when we
asked one of the girls, "What did you do with the mouse?"
She replied, "I'm going to let him go." Since her hands
were empty I assumed it was a grammar problem and asked,
 "Going
to let him go?" She then reaches into her tight jean
pocket and starts to squeeze the mouse out like pushing toothpaste
out of the tube. She let him go by tossing his flat body off to
the side of the road. The other girls were upset and the dads
moved everyone pretty quickly toward the mess hall. On the way
back we checked on him and said, "Maybe he is just sleeping?"
The girls are a bit too old for that trick since they looked at us
like we must be nuts or senile saying, "There are ants
crawling out of his eyes, he isn't sleeping. "
One of the dads opens a window which
solves the musty smell and air conditioning problem so most
of the girls settle down to go to sleep. A few of us
stay up standing around our three log smoky fire and play guess
the band. I notice a huge bonfire three campsite down
from us. It is at least a meter and a half high, taller than
most of the guys standing around it. They obviously
have had way too much espresso. I am not sure
how they were ever going to go to bed with it since it will take
hours and hours for this fire to burn out. One of the
other dads ask me if I want to go over with him to check it out.
I start to walk over there but then I hear someone say, "You
got a mighty pretty mouth, boy." and decide to call it a
night and go back to the cabin and lock the door.
I am the first one up in the
morning. Not much to do that early. I don't want to
wake the rest of the cabin so I walk down to the mess hall to get
a cup of coffee. I really don't like coffee much but there
is not a lot of choice. I also assume that the smell of
coffee will wake the rest of the dads and at least I'll have
someone to talk to. It is about 6:00 am and on the way to
the mess hall I notice a lot of cars leaving. This
confuses me since I think if I was going to leave at 6:00 am I
would have left at 9:00 pm the night before so I could sleep in my
own, non-musty bed where the only person snoring was me.
I mention this to one of the other dads and he says, " The
Byron Nelson golf tournament is this weekend."
The weatherman called for a weekend of
rain but we didn't get a drop and the clear blue skies coupled with
the Byron must have been overwhelming. We went to
chapel, at least the dads that were up early enough.
Chapel is always a bit funny because we don't have any priest or
pastors with us on Sunday in fact maybe some of them were going back
to work at 6:00 am. Any way that means that one of
the dads has to deliver the service and say a few words.
The nice thing is that the service is always very short.
One of them was a dad reading the back cover of a relationship
book. He thanked us for spending time with our kids and said, "The
greatest thing that a father can do for his children is to love
their mother." I thought that was very sweet and
since I'm married to Cheryl it is a pretty easy task, but looking
around I noticed a couple of obviously divorced dads who had to
swallow hard and smile at their daughters.
We walked over to breakfast but since
the line was pretty long and Katie didn't like anything at any
meal we turned around and I asked , "Do you want to head
home? We can stop at some place on the way back to
Southlake." She saw an opportunity to get home
early enough to call a friend and have them come over to the house
to play. We drove about 50 miles and I saw a
sign for McDonald's. I asked if she wanted to stop. It
was about 10:30 in the morning so I knew they would still be
serving breakfast. I wasn't sure what Katie would eat
but she wanted to stop. I think mostly because Matthew loves
to eat breakfast at McDonald's. We stopped and I
look at the menu and look at Katie and realize that there is
nothing she will eat. She wants some French fries
which are not on the breakfast menu. We get back into
the car and I pick up the pace. We are home by 12:30 pm.
I unpack the car while Katie starts
to call her friends. I take a quick shower and tell
Cheryl it would be fine with me if she burned my clothes. I
put on a smoke free pair of jeans and even though it is kind of
early, I figure what the hell, and pop open a can of
espresso.
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