My wife recently took a job where she has to travel a lot. Luckily, most of the travel is during the week so I get most of the day to myself while he’s at daycare. It’s really not too bad as I get him ready in the morning, come back, do work then go pick him up for our daily afternoon adventures, get him fed, cleaned and slept, and possibly do more work if I wasn’t quite able to get to everything. It’s a bit of a balancing act, but it’s very manageable.
Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly plan out things very well while my wife was out of town for one of the days on her most recent trip.
This all started two months previously when he was scheduled to go to his first dentist appointment. He got sick right before his trip to the dentist so we had to delay that initial visit. I already felt bad that we had waited until three-years-old for his first appointment as I hear about other parents getting a visit with the dentist after one tooth, so when they told me that the first available appointment wasn’t for two months, I took the opening without thinking about the consequences.
And for months, I never even considered the consequences, because I never even looked at the time after putting it on my calendar. The appointment was there, and knowing my wife was out of town was also definitely on my mind. Finally, the week of the appointment, I finally looked at it and realized that I was completely screwed.
I’m not sure if there is a worse time that this appointment could have been, because 10:30 really put a wrench in my plans. I thought this would be easy, just go take him to his dentist appointment and drop him back off at school and get back to work. At 10:30, that plan falls apart quickly. Sure, I can get him, but bringing him back after might make him miss lunch, and that’s a whole lot of drama where he’s trying to eat while the other kids are winding down, so then he might miss his nap and cause chaos for the class, and then he’s going to be an angry little man by the time I bring him home.
So he ended up having a very short day at school, and I ended up taking a half day at work so I could fully devote myself to my child.
Obviously, when I got there, he did not want to go with me. They were in the middle of a fire drill, so I let him hang outside with his friends for a few minutes before he begrudgingly went with me to the dentist. He doesn’t really have a fear of the dentist yet, but it wasn’t exciting either. He used to hate the doctor, but that has subsided since he doesn’t always get some sort of shot every time he goes there. The dentist was a new experience. He was cautious, and I told him there would be fun toys at the dentist’s office. I didn’t know if this was true, but I figured a kids’ dentist would have toys for kids to play with.
Well, I was kind of right, but mostly wrong. They had games to play with, but there were only video games. Being three-years-old, it wasn’t ideal for him, but one of them was a racing game, and he at least had fun kind of controlling it, kind of letting me control it and watching a race. Luckily, we only had to wait a few minutes before our dentist visit.
You know what was awesome about the dentist visit? There’s not much to say. I was worried that he would not respond well to just having Daddy and not Mommy there, and he would turn into a screaming ball of chaos. I also worried that we had waited too long to bring him in for his first visit, but both the hygenist and dentist said his teeth look great and for him to keep doing what he’s doing. He handled it super well and was a tremendous patient, and sometimes no stories are the best type of stories to have.
We celebrated by going to a new park that was near his dentist’s office, grabbed some Chick Fil-A for lunch and relaxed on the living room mattress to eat lunch and watch some cartoons. I knew he wouldn’t sleep (he naps every day at school and never at home), but I needed him to rest up, because the afternoon was going to be ambitious. Still, the day was going pretty dang well.
We were going to try something new. We had never been to a children’s museum 20 minutes away, and now it was time to give it a shot. I had my parents meet us at our house before we left, because I figured he’d at least be excited to hang out with his grandparents, even if the museum didn’t excite him.
That 20 minute drive felt like an hour as my man was none too pleased. He was tired and out of his mind. My Mom drew the short stick and had to sit in the backseat with him, and he was not a pleasant seatmate. He basically hated the world, and things were looking bleak that going for a new adventure would actually turn out to be a good idea.
But good idea it was. On the walk up to the museum, the fresh air invigorated him and he let my Dad know that he is a boy and has a penis, and he let my Mom know that she is a girl with a vagina. My man knows the technical terms, and he’s not afraid to teach adults.
But when he walked inside. Things went to a new level. He literally ran around for five straight minutes from station to station as he nonstop giggled his face off. He barely touched anything as he was basically trying to get a sip of water from a firehose of experiences.
When he finally calmed down his level of excitement from 11 to 9.5, he just wanted to try everything. It didn’t matter what he was doing as long as he was doing it. He climbed a beanstalk, he built a lego car, he built a foam track, he played in fake sand, and he just ran around and had fun. To see that amount of joy on his face was incredible, and I knew that Daddy had done good today. Now, I know it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “museum built for children might be good for my child,” but I don’t get points for brilliant ideas, just effective ones.
After a wonderful couple hours at the museum, we headed back and my Dad sat in the backseat but Spencer was as happy as could be back there, high off all the fun he just had. When we got back, I let him do his own thing while I made dinner, and after some brief refusals to touch anything I had made, he finally settled in and had a big dinner. After that, we were on cruise control. A bath, some book reading, and within about 15 seconds of the light being turned off after that final book, the man was out for the night.
I snuck out of the room and breathed a sigh of relief. My incompetence led to me needing to take a half day from work, but I made the most of the day, and even the next morning, he couldn’t wait to tell his Mom about all the cool stuff we did.
It was amazing watching Spencer’s reaction to the museum. We all love it!