“Yippee!”
My wife got mad at me for dumping all the stuff on the beach with her and our three young children and rushing into the ocean.
Geez! I thought.
She should have known better than to marry a surfer.
Of course, I didn’t ask her if she’d seen the waves I’d ridden. I came in and meekly started to help out with the children and then took the kids into the water.
It is a challenge to find the time to surf when you have three children under the age of eight, and it can be agonizing to stay out of the water when the waves are big and the winds perfect. I’ve had a conversation over the phone with a friend in a similar situation, both of us trying to find ways to wriggle out of commitments or find a place to dump the family so that we can race into the ocean. My wife can tell when the fever takes hold of me. I start racing around the house to get all the gear together and the family into the car because I know that the surf will be killer. [continue reading…]
Yeah, nothing like a good lie-in
My son is an early riser.
I can hear him turn on the television at the break of dawn.
A deafening thunder rattles me out of sleep. Then I hear him scrambling to find the controls before the volume comes down to a near silence.
I then hear my other two children, eight and three, wander down the stairs. The dog yelps and my wife, lying at my side, groans out just audibly, “The dog wants to go out,” before she pulls the pillow over her head again.
Then I hear my own footsteps going down the stairs and think, we need to get rid of the TV.
Or have the in-laws move in. [continue reading…]
“Watch out, boys!”
My eldest daughter wants to play football.
So I took the eight-year-old with her brother, six, to have a go at a summer football clinic in Pinamar, where we are spending the summer on the coast of Argentina.
She put on her Argentina jersey, so did her brother and their younger sister, who is three. She tagged along with her own ball to have a play with daddy while the others trained.
I looked at my eldest daughter, a die-hard fan of Argentina and Carlos Tevez.
She was jumping up and down, warming her legs for the session.
I smiled nervously. I wanted to warn her about the machismo in Argentina, her own country, and that the boys might not want to play with a girl. They may not pass to a girl and they may tackle her just as if she was a boy, and it may hurt. [continue reading…]
