It turned out to be a beautiful Saturday morning, nearly perfect for a bike ride. As the girls have gotten older, it’s become harder to convince everyone to join me for a bike ride. It’s almost as if riding bikes to waterfalls or in the woods, or along scenic paths just isn’t as cool as it used to be. Go figure.
At any rate, I didn’t have to do any convincing for this bike ride. The day before we’d started a new summer tradition, the pick jar, another brainchild of my brilliant wife. We’d both grown tired of trying to figure out what we were going to do on our Fridays off this summer which we’ve been affectionatey calling, Fun Fridays. Except, the process of selecting a joint activity that all six can agree on (sometimes 8 or 9 depending on if my sisters and mother in law join us) can take a lot of you. By the time you get to the activity you’re already in a foul mood. That’s what happens in big families, you have to learn how to share and take turns. That’s not a terrible thing, but it isn’t easy either. Especially when you’re the dad and you want your way too.
So here’s how the pick jar works: everyone writes two activity ideas on slips of paper and drops them in. Then each Friday, we draw one or two activities and just go. Simple. We didn’t even set any parameters, which, as you’ll see, turned out to be a learning opportunity, mostly for us the parents.
To mark our inaugural draw, I took everyone out for breakfast. Which, for the record, we never do; breakfast is my favorite meal and I cook it for the family every single day. But everyone else loved the spontaneity of it, and apparently everyone but me loves eating out. I’m not going to read too much into that one.
My original plan was to ask our waitress to make the first selection from the jar. As you can imagine, my daughters were horrified and pleaded with me to please not embarrass them. Fine. Calm down. I genuinely thought it would be fun and for what it’s worth, she actually came back to our table later (while the girls were in the bathroom) to ask what we were doing. She’d seen the jar and noticed all the laughter when we made our selections. We explained the whole thing and she left impressed. Told you she’d be down.
Since the waitress idea was vetoed, I asked Olivia to film the first draw which I got to make myself. I was excited too, because I didn’t know which slip I’d pull either. Look at me, enjoying relinquishing control. Anyway, my feeling of satisfaction at my growth and happiness about being in the moment quickly shifted. My expression in the video says it all when I first read the slip of paper. London had written for one of her activities, mommy and daddy have to give us each $100 for a shopping spree. I mean, I love a good shopping spree myself, but maybe we needed to set some parameters. No way was I shelling out $400 bucks for a shopping spree given what we’d just spent so much money on other things. Besides, the spirit of Fun Friday was less about consumerism and more about experiences… We settled on a compromise, we’d do a shopping spree after all (at a different dollar amount), and only if it included our favorite place to hang out, the bookstore. It turns out everyone won on that one.
For the second pick, which Sloane our youngest did the honors . She pulled one of my choices, which was a bike ride on the Silver Comet trail. I’d actually been saving that for a Father’s Day activity, but it was nice that fate intervened early. The only problem was, we weren’t really prepared to do both that day. It was already approaching 11am which meant that our window for bike riding in the sweltering Atlanta heat was closing, and besides, there are few places to shop near the trails we would enter. So we decided to get up early on Saturday morning and do our biking activity then. Even grandma came along, and my sister met up with us afterwards so it turned out to be a family affair.
Three weeks into summer break, the real lesson has been learning to compromise. I’ve had to find a new workspace, for the first time in years, I’m working out of a co-working space downtown instead of my home office. It’s just easier to give the girls the house during the day. Better for their peace of mind and mine. I come home to a clean house (because, as London openly admits, they pull everything together right before I walk in). And they don’t have their dad wandering around pointing out every little mess, overreacting to every loud noise, or yelling for them to go outside every five minutes.
No one gets their way all of the time. A lot of the time, the best solution is in the middle. Glad we’re finding ours this summer.
One more thing, we decided to update the jar this week (maybe weekly?) with one more choice added by each of us. After the first week, we noticed something: everyone had a better attitude about whatever got selected when they’d had a hand in offering the ideas. It made us all want to contribute more. Plus, we like being surprised together (within parameters of course!).
This week I added Topgolf to the jar, so let’s see what happens this Father’s Day weekend.
SDW3
everyday fatherhood 