Bachelor Dad

That probably should be Dad Bachelor instead, to put it into the right order.

My wife Liz needed a break, so she left from work on an overnighter out of town (tomorrow is her day off). She had enough travel points for a freebie at one of the hotel chains, and is now, even as we speak, pulling the handle on slot machines and maybe even placing a bet or two on the ponies.

I'll probably do something similar this fall, 'cept I'll head south to spend the weekend launching rockets down in North Carolina. She's got her ways of burning money. I've got mine.

Mookie has been agitating for a party. Her birthday parties always suck because in July everyone is out of town for the summer. This year she came up with the idea of a birthday/end-of-school party, to be held in the afternoon of the last day of school. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and two fake heart attacks on my part, she whittled the guest list down to 50.

The next battle was over the venue. Her idea (and not all that bad) was to have the party in our backyard and the common area behind our house. The stopper there was the certainty of neighborhood crashers, some who would probably be taking full advantage of the chance to case my home for a later, unsupervised, visit. Nope, our house was out for that many kids.

We suggested checking into pavilions at some of the local parks, and this afternoon Mookie and I drove to one close by and looked around. Even if it was too late to reserve a pavilion for next friday (as I suspected), there was still plenty of room to spread out blankets and toss frisbees and footballs and kick around the hacky sack. We found the number for the park office and she made the call.

Half an hour later we were in the park office and I was signing the contract to reserve the largest pavilion for the entire day. We got it for half price because it was a weekday ($20 bucks and some change - cheap!), and we were about 15 minutes ahead of a cub scout leader who also wanted it. Maximum of 50 kids, no alcohol, no live band or DJ, all the usual stuff you'd expect.

So that was the "dad" part. The "bachelor" part isn't that my wife is away until tomorrow night, it's because I had a bowl of corn flakes for dinner.

Posted by Ted at June 8, 2005 07:22 PM
Category: Square Pegs