My wife left Friday morning for a long weekend at a scrapbooking retreat, leaving me with our son and daughter. From this and other experiences, I’ve learned some valuable strategies for surviving these kinds of weekends and I am going to share them with you. The most important thing you can do is make a plan. Don’t leave things to chance and by all means don’t let your kids determine what happens. If you do, you run the risk of having to interact with them, do things with them, and maybe even share some fun. To avoid that, try some of the things I list below:
Adopt Other Children for the Weekend
This sounds counterintuitive because you actually have to be responsible for more kids. Believe it or not, there is some kind of reduction effect that happens. I’m sure there is a mathematical formula that explains it with multivariate statistics and a logarithm is in there too. If you introduce additional kids into the mix, then your kids will get along better, be happier, and, most importantly, won’t look to you to pay them attention, entertain them, or even feed them very much. So far, we had one friend over yesterday afternoon and she lasted until my kids fell asleep. Now today (Saturday), we’ve got another friend over and she’ll be here at least until after dinner. If I wasn’t writing this blog, I could get some work done—could being the most important word here.
Drive Them into Submission
If you can’t find other kids, get yours in the car and drive them into submission. We did this yesterday. We literally drove over 100 miles just in the local area. The trick is to convince them that the driving is in their interest—even if it is really just to kill time and keep you from having to actually do something. We drove to the grocery store where we got some popcicles, sugary cereal, and frozen lemonade. Then we drove to a small gift shop, where my daughter bought a change purse and my son bought rock star plastic bracelets—a small price to pay to avoid real engagement with my kids. Then, we did the big one. We drove about 25 miles each way to go pick up a friend. We must have spent more than half the day in the car and all I had to do was sit on my ass and play songs on the radio!
Find Safe and Educational Home Activities
If you have to be at home, and it is impossible to avoid it, find some new things to do or put a unique twist on familiar activities. This will make life seem new, interesting, and fresh…and they’ll leave you alone. For example, my kids and their friend are all on our trampoline right now--a nice, healthy, safe activity. The cool twist is that each of them is wearing just one roller skate on their foot. Oh sure it’s a tad more dangerous than just jumping on the trampoline, but danger is exciting, fresh, and fun. Yesterday, my kids and the visitor de jour set up a lemonade stand—good clean American fun. They learned about the pleasures of capitalism. Now here’s the twist. They did it at night! It was a starlight lemonade stand. Sure, it’s hard to sell lemonade at night in March, but it taught them important lessons like perseverance, innovation, and failure. And it allowed me to bust some platitudes on them, like “success doesn’t come easy,” or “hardship builds character,’ or my favorite “capitalism is an inherently unfair system where labor is exploited by capital.”
Meals are another opportunity to make the usual unusual. If you work it right, any meal can become a time-consuming event. Breakfast is one of my favorites. If you let the kids actually mix up the pancake batter, pour it in the pan, sprinkle the chocolate chips on, and do their own dusting with powdered sugar, then breakfast can take hours and they will have done all the work. And they will have themselves a wonderful, healthy (sugary) meal. Sure there is extra clean up, but the time to sip coffee and read the news kid-free is priceless.
Dinner is good for this, too but it requires one critical element—fire. It is a well-known fact that no kid can resist an open fire. They are drawn to it like moths, not to fly into it but to shove things in, to burn stuff. Sure, they burn themselves sometimes or even household tools, but it is all in the name of learning. Dinner is a homeschool lesson in fire management and sometimes first aid. The great thing about fire is that it makes really good man food, too—meat!! Tonight we’ll be having steaks, burgers, and crab legs (probably not grilled) along with baked potatoes and a salad (lip service to healthy eating). I’ve been dying for a steak cooked over a real fire for quite a while. My son wants to try crab legs and the girls just want to get past the meat so that they can play with the fire and make the mother of all kid treats—smores! Sure, smores will sugar them up and keep them awake, but they will also keep them busy during an important period—digesting. While they are burning marshmallows to a crisp, dropping chocolate bars in the fire, and getting melted sugar in their hair, I’ll be lingering happily over the remains of my fatty meat feast.
Electronic Parenting
When all else fails or when you fail everything else (because you are too full of fatty meat to do anything else), the crucial fall back is electronic media—a new movie, taped episodes of Tom and Jerry or Scooby Doo, or just good old cable TV. This actually is a good evening finisher. After the sugar from the smores wears off and before they get too engrossed in something more active, plop ‘em in front of some good, passive entertainment. We’ve got a variety of mind-numbing Disney classics, including a really new one that some kids haven’t seen yet. We also just got Robin Hood in the mail. I know my son will dig that, but I have a feeling that the two little girls won’t.
This is where I am afraid my perfect plan has a hole. You really need to avoid these holes because it leaves an opening for your kids to figure out something to do on their own. This is dangerous! If they go off your carefully crafted script, then they may find something to do that actually requires participation from you. Just as bad, they may find something so active, so stimulating, so fun that they actually get caught up in it and stay awake longer. So be careful—one little hole can tear a good night apart. If you time the electronic media right, you’ll have your kids asleep early enough that you can actually watch something you want to watch.
In my case that would be the taped replay of the first stage of the Criterium International. I’m hoping I might even get more than 6 hours of sleep, too. I’ll need it because I’ve still got one more day to fill and no new kids to bring over, no new movies to watch, and no new meat to scorch. This leads to my last piece of advice: Make sure your plan covers the entire time you are to be alone with your kids. Otherwise, you might have to play with your kids. Sure that sounds like fun, but don’t be tempted. If you do it once, they’ll expect it. They’ll tell their friends and their friends will expect it of you, too. Before you know it, your kids and their friends will like you. Remember that sage piece of advice from the days of yore: Your kids don’t need another friend, they need a father!
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