Let me go on the record as saying just how excited I am that David is out of school for this entire upcoming week. Seven days of quality time just the Minkey and myself every morning until my wife gets home. Whereas my natural inclination when faced with extra time upon my hands in to give serious consideration to the dying art of napping, my son, like sons since the dawn of time, has chosen to rebel against the things his father loves, and instead of trying to catch up on all the sleep he had ever been deprived of, prefers to run around the house like the bastard offspring of a hurricane and banshee. It’s not that I don’t enjoy spending time with the fruit of my loins, but he is a rather high-strung individual, and his boundless energy seems to be tapped straight from my reserves. I can’t really fault him for this, however, as I have it on good authority that this mutant power is hereditary. I suppose it’s only fair, but it’s not terribly convenient. I like to think that waiting until my late twenties to become a father allowed me to have a better perspective on life, and gave me a chance to mellow slightly. The downside, however, is that the inspiration of youth seemed to stave off the necessity of naptime, and my mellowing, while philosophically sound, has left me in my offspring’s dust.

So that means that when we wake up at the crack of dawn (because David has no issue waking up on days he doesn’t have to be somewhere at a certain time), I have to be ready to be coherent, instead of trusting on my autopilot to simply get him clothed, fed, groomed, and out the door to school in time for him to get there and start forgetting everything he’s learned. At least that’s what I imagine happens to him after the first bell has rung, based upon what he tells me everyday when I pick him up from school. Again, this is something I’ve probably passed along, as I can’t remember actually learning anything on any given day at school, and yet somehow I was ready every time there was a test. I think I may have learned through the process of osmosis, and I don’t think that I can judge him if he is able to do the same. It is irritating, though. I may be forced to proffer an apology to my mother for the seventeen years I spent telling her everything that she was doing wrong. I’m not saying that she wasn’t, just that living with me seems to take its toll on folks, and maybe she wasn’t all to blame.

So, besides laying prone before a Hi-Def screen and mashing buttons on a video game controller, what is it exactly that the kids of today are into? Maybe we’ll have some sort of competition where he reads a book while I run laps. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take us somewhere fun and quasi-educational, like a zoo, or maybe we’ll just wander the streets of Not Quite Richmond, CA, and complain about how horribly clement the weather is. Used to be that a vacation meant that the odds of me having to put on pants were low enough I couldn’t limbo under them, but even if it was okay to stroll the streets in boxer briefs, I think my legs would blind oncoming traffic. So I’m going to have to put on pants and face the irritatingly perfect climate of the San Francisco Bay Area during winter. That, and try to find somewhere that wants to pay me for my willingness to spend a third of my day pretending that I wouldn’t rather be at home watching Netflix and avoiding people who I never wanted to have met. But I’m getting a little off topic here. The real quandary is how I can keep my son entertained without running myself ragged.

I need the exercise for my body and David needs to exercise his mind (I think he’s burning enough calories doing laps around the apartment). I suppose I could try to explain the rules of baseball to him, but we’d need several other people to make a decent demonstration of it, and that would mean subjecting myself to the presence of other children that I don’t feel a biological imperative to protect. In case anyone thinks that I am just hashing this out to pad the word count and try to knock off early, I mean, sure, that is a part of it, but I seriously am drawing a blank as to what interests that my son and I may have in common. I have no doubt that at some point in the distant past, some prior version of me would have loved hanging out with David, and they would have had the most amazing time running around like madmen and getting into trouble. The problem is that I don’t run so much anymore (to the point where I’d rather wait a half an hour for the next bus to come along than to hurt my knees trying to sprint less than thirty yards to reach the bus stop), and the only trouble I get into anymore is of a more financial nature. I’m trying to put my finger on the moment when my son and I began to drift so far apart, but I don’t know how close we were to begin with.

The last time I left a job and spent some time trying to find myself, my son and I bonded over Star Trek and Doctor Who. He was a year old, and easy to keep up with, and my knees and back weren’t nearly so shot as they are now. I don’t know. Maybe it’s time that I throw caution to the wind, and let myself go off in search of a little fun. Maybe while I’m trying to cram wisdom into my baby boy’s cabeza, he can teach me a thing or two about going with the moment and not worrying so much about the things that I cannot control. It’s disturbing to think that I may have room to grow and lessons left to learn. It’s a good thing my mom doesn’t read my blog, or I’d never hear the end of this. So maybe the only thing that I have to worry about is getting out of my comfort zone and rounding out my character. And here I was hoping that I could remain curmudgeonly forever, having mastered it at such an early age.

Here’s to a week of unexpected adventures and a gold mine of things for me to gripe about in a humorous fashion for all of you!

-Tex