Category: Kids

I drove a Chevy S-10 pickup truck for years.  This truck had a standard transmission.  When my kids were young, it was a rare occasion that any of them would ride in the truck with me, especially by the time we had more than one kid. The problem was fitting more than one car seat in the small cab of this truck.  On the rare occasion when I would put two car seats in the truck, there was barely enough room for me to sit. And when I did get in the truck, it was difficult to reach the stick to shift gears. It was just easier to use my wife’s vehicle when I needed to go anywhere with the kids.

Back when my son was in school, he had an assignment that he needed to put in a folder.  He was upstairs in our house one evening and shouted down to his mother to tell her that he needed a folder.  He didn’t need the folder immediately, but my wife didn’t know this. Additionally, she had just gotten home from the store where she could have picked one up for him.

When my youngest daughter was little, she liked to sing.  While all my children have musical talent, she is the one who continues to play. She is the most outgoing of my kids and has always been more likely to sing in public. At family gatherings, she would occasionally sing my song Wild Man in the Desert while my son and I would accompany her on guitars. But like most kids, she was more likely to sing children’s songs that she heard on the variety of recordings and videos she watched.

My son never liked mowing the yard. During the last few years of being at home before he moved out on his own, mowing the yard became his responsibility. Even though it was his job, he still needed to be constantly reminded to do it. I had hoped that he would decide when it needed to be done and do it then but I ended up telling him when to do it. And I would usually let it go a little longer between mowing in hope that he would realize the need on his own.  That never happened.

My two oldest children are 17 months apart in age.  When they were small, we owned a double-wide stroller that we used for them whenever we went shopping.  We made one of these trips specifically to buy a new coat for my oldest daughter, May, who was the only daughter at the time.  We made a trip to Memphis for this shopping trip. From where we lived at the time, we planned on a two hour trip just to get to the store where we wanted to shop. This meant we had to do planning to make sure that we avoid crying kids. We successfully avoiding the screaming road trip but we had sleepy kids when we arrived at the store. 

When my girls were young, it became a tradition for us to attend a Father Daughter dance around Valentine’s Day. My oldest daughter was three years old when we went to our first dance. She was so excited about the dance that she did not get her normal afternoon nap that day. There were struggles and a few tears as she was getting dressed for the dance because she was tired.  She had a new dress just for the dance. We would arrive at the dance early that also included a dinner.