My wife was doing her science fair project today. Fortunately my 8 year old son helped a lot. It’s actually his project but observing you would think it was my wife’s. As the project was moving forward I noticed my 8 year old daughter was about to drive my wife crazy. Mom can’t be deep into a science project and be expected to listen and answer questions from my daughter regarding hair and clothes. I tried to distract her and even offered to do something with her outside but she politely refused. The things I suggested were too boy oriented…bike riding, fishing, scooter riding, etc….
After a few more bouts of attacking my wife and me pulling her away I found her in the living room getting ready to “teach”. One of her daily routines is lining up her dolls and sometimes stuffed animals and teaching them stuff often imitating her teacher at school. It seems that her teacher is pretty nice but gets a little bent out of shape when someone talks in class. She had an art easel holding a poster board and a couple of chairs sitting in front of it. As I noticed there were no students she told ME to sit down. I obeyed and she started making a list of things to do: go to mall, get “nales” done, go to sonic, and once that’s all done she was going to take a shower. Pretty impressive plan! Pretending to be ignorant I asked what it was. She was explaining that this is what she and mommy were going to do when mommy was done helping her brother. I began to see that this was about to happen to me not her mom. My wife was going to be working on his project the rest of the afternoon so I could either take over the project or take my daughter to fulfill her plan for the afternoon. And that’s what I did.
Stop one: the mall. We grabbed a pretzel and coke at Auntie Annie’s and went to find her favorite store on the map. Justice was not on the map but she insisted it was in the mall. I asked her what she wanted there and she said “earrings!!” in a tone that also relayed that I was an idiot for not knowing the obvious reason someone goes to Justice. Nothing good there; went to Claire’s and she bought some earrings.
Stop two: nail shop. First of all, women freak out when a man walks into a nail shop. As a male if you ever walk in a nail shop and they don’t act freaked out you may want to practice acting manly. “My I help you?” the clerk cocks her head sideways like a puzzled dog. They hope it involves the little pretty girl at my side but they don’t want to insult me I guess. She gets her nails done while I listen to some old woman tell me more men ought to take their daughters out to get their nails done. I’m thinking that there’s some nail epidemic that has created this need but she let me know how most dad’s are losers. I know some pretty good dads so she must be hanging out with the wrong crowd(her husband???).
Stop three: Sonic. Nuf said…
Stop four: Walgreens. This is to pickup some project supplies for my wife and son. I was able to make it into a daughter event by letting her buy some candy.
Last stop is home. I felt like I had conquered the world without even sweating. I always have these glorious plans in my head as to what a great time with any of my children would be like. This plan was not the way I would have expected any of those plans working out. I was amazed at how horribly easy it was and how thoroughly thrilled my daughter was. I was king daddy again and enjoyed watching my daughter do what she had planned. She is tooooo sweet.
After I Think About It... 