Playing My Dad Card
As I’ve said before, my process here is to typically write the day before each newsletter edition is published. I write Tuesday’s newsletter on Monday, and Wednesday’s on Tuesday, and so on. That means I write Monday’s newsletter on Friday, then I just refresh it first thing Monday morning in case anything happened over the weekend that requires me to update it.
I’m not doing that this week. And the reason is because I’m a dad.
It’s been a busy few weeks around here.
Our youngest daughter graduated from Kansas State University on May 11, so we drove out to Manhattan for that, and the following weekend we hosted a party for her at our house.
Since Mother’s Day happened in the middle of that, I also coordinated getting the kids gift ideas for my wife, and arranging for when they could give them to her.
Our middle daughter finished her first year as a teacher and had to pack up and move to a new apartment, which required some dad work to assist her.
Our oldest daughter is also a teacher, as well as a new mom, and we’ve had grandparent duty for several days to help her out as she cleaned out her classroom, interviewed at a new school, set up her new classroom, and so on. Folks, I knew from my days as a new dad nearly three decades ago that an infant who is just becoming independently mobile requires a whole new layer of attention, but that was when I was in my twenties. I’m nearly fifty-six now, and please believe me when I tell you that amps up the degree of difficulty quite a bit.
As I mentioned last week, our son got married on June 9. We had a lot of family in town for it and hosted a party at our house the day before the wedding, then had the wedding itself.
In the middle of all this, both my wife and I got some sort of upper respiratory bug that lingered a long time, and we’re still feeling the effects.
To be clear, I’m not complaining about any of this. In fact, I loved every minute of it. (Well, not the bug we caught.) These were all exciting, happy events for each of our kids, and it was both touching and rewarding to be there for all of it.
But I’m tired.
It’s a good tired, one I wouldn’t trade for anything due to the events that tired me out. But these past few weeks have undoubtedly left us dragging, so I’m taking the opportunity of Father’s Day this weekend to play my dad card and not write anything new for Monday. Instead, I’m linking to the edition I wrote last year about my dad, a guy I miss every day.
For those who were here last year, I’m sorry for the repeat publication. For those who are new, I hope you enjoy it.
And for any fellow dads out there, I hope you had a Happy Father’s Day, and got to spend it with children as wonderful as mine.