Maya had been planning Father’s Day ever since we had Mother’s Day. She saved a box for Dad’s gift and decorated it with stickers. At every opportunity, she suggested we go to the craft store for supplies. Ian mostly wanted to know what kind of cake we would be making him.

This crazy bunch!

Before any of that though, we have to talk about Maya’s “graduation” from preschool. Sean and I thought we were dropping by the school to check out the older primary students’ science projects. Maya and her classmate Faustine did an experiment demonstrating buoyancy. They dropped raisins and pasta into soda and as the bubbles collected, sure enough, those items were buoyant. The other kids all had their experiments set up as well, complete with poster boards explaining them and guiding the grown-ups toward the sort of questions they could ask the kids to help them demonstrate their knowledge.

Budding scientist.

To our surprise, after the science fair wrapped up, they booted us all from the room so they could set up for graduation! Each kid who was moving on from preschool or private kindergarten was called up to receive a certificate and a medal and to have photos taken. Amazingly Maya was able to sit through the whole thing. I have to admit, Sean and I were nervous.

Earlier in the spring, the kids had had a fun visit to the Thinkery. One of their favorite things was building art projects out of scraps and trash that had been collected up and saved for that purpose. We now have a corrugated cardboard box into which the kids chuck the things they may want to repurpose later for some sculpture or mixed media masterpiece. They call it “the art box.” It has various containers, straws, lids, labels, etc for them to put together however their imagination directs them.

Art car!

Maybe a week or two before Father’s Day, Sean spent time with them making “art cars.” They built axles with straws and skewers, wheels out of old lids, and decorated them with bottle caps and craft supplies. They were brilliant, and the kids had so much fun putting them together. The comment at the end of the day (probably by me) was something like, “See, Dad can do art projects too!”

Taking Dad to fancy dinner

The day before Father’s Day, we took Sean to “fancy dinner” at the Second Bar + Kitchen restaurant at the Domain. Maya was all into it, wanting to dress up and have barrettes in her hair and the whole bit. Ian had received a new rainbow shirt from Lolli and Pop, and even though he’d worn it the day before, he insisted that it needed to be washed so he could wear it again to our fancy dinner. We did manage to talk him into pants, which honestly surprised me, but we couldn’t convince him to wear anything but his flip-flops, and it just wasn’t worth the fight to get real shoes on his feet. Plus we live in Austin. Flip-flops aren’t out of the norm.

Maya and Ian did ok. They were pretty antsy, like always, but at least Maya seemed to understand when I tried to explain that it was a special dinner for Dad and it would make him really happy if he could just relax and enjoy it. Sean and I enjoyed our food. Maya enjoyed her swanky mocktail. And the kids surprised us by leveling a spicy meatball appetizer.

They had tiramisu brownies for their dessert. As we ordered them, Ian started to look well and truly concerned, to the point of tears. We tried asking him what was wrong and he loudly insisted, he didn’t want any soup on his brownies!!! Dude, it’s tiramisu, not tirami-soup.

We eat really early so we annoy as few diners as possible.

The restaurant is within the Archer Hotel, and the space it occupies is big and bright and open. That big open space makes for a very natural extension of the hotel space, and from our table, we could see a big stone staircase kind of half-spiraling upward around a giant chandelier. What the kids wanted to do most of all through the better part of dinner was walk up the big staircase.

While Sean finished his dessert and settled the check, the kids and I meandered up the staircase. Ian is completely obsessed with stairs. Probably since he could walk, even if you were carrying him, he’d want to be put down so he could walk the stairs on his own. Today was no different, except that he and Maya wanted to count them. Maya’s pretty solid on counting to 100 at this point, but Ian’s approach is more … creative. One through twelve are pretty good, but thirteen and fourteen often get munged into one and there is no seventeen, only eleventeen. He’s pretty consistent with it, “fiwteen, fifteen, sixteen, eleventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!” It drives Maya nuts, and she constantly tries to teach him the right way. Needless to say, she had to hurry ahead of us so he didn’t ruin her count.

Can’t take us anywhere

When we got to the top, we discovered we could look out over the restaurant and the kids had fun spotting Dad and trying to get his attention. He joined us in the sitting area at the top of the stairs for a few minutes, and Maya and Ian horsed around on the furniture. Dresses be damned, Maya was jumping off of stuff.

The next morning, on actual Father’s Day, we had a fun event to attend. Before that though, Maya and Ian wanted to give Dad his gifts. They had each gotten him a T-shirt and made him both beaded key chains and beaded necklaces. I tried to talk them into just the key chains, but they insisted that Dad needed pretty necklaces just like I had gotten. (Subtitle: the kids really like stringing beads.)

Kapow!

The Alamo Drafthouse, our favorite movie theater, often throws family parties for new release kid movies. We had taken Maya to see Finding Dory as part of a family party a couple summers ago. This day, we were seeing Incredibles 2. Beforehand, they had tables set up where you could decorate a superhero mask, construct your own superhero emblem, and create flip books and color Incredibles coloring sheets. The big draw was outside though. The fine folks at the Drafthouse had set up an entire obstacle course. They had two separate courses set up, so people could compete for time. Maya and Ian (with Dad’s help) competed. It turns out the Ian actually won. Maya cares a lot more about having fun than winning, so she took her time playing with some of the things along the way.

Dad and Ian at the movies!

Maya has gotten to the point where she can generally sit through a movie, but I was figuring Ian would get bored, and I’d wind up taking him to the bathroom half a dozen times. During the pre-show, kids got to go down to the front of the theater and exercise their superhero powers. Some of them froze the audience, some made them all simultaneously yawn. Maya’s superpower was to make everyone act like octopuses, tentacles a-wagging.

Octopus Maya

During the movie, Ian nestled into my lap and nibbled at his lunch. Maya giggled and shrieked through the whole thing. She especially loved Jack Jack. Had it been a whole movie full of Jack Jack, that would have been fine with her. The one thing Ian talks most about is the giant vacuum cleaner that sucked up Mr Incredible. The kids traded parents partway through, and Ian fell asleep in Sean’s lap. But, we all got to watch the movie, all the way through. We didn’t have to take a single bathroom break. I’d never have guessed it.

That afternoon, we made Dad a chocolate cake. When you have kids, of course, the cake is never really *your* cake. One third of it had no icing because Maya doesn’t like icing. Another third had purple icing and christmas-tree shaped sprinkles because those were Ian’s choices, and the last lone third was done up with orange icing, because that’s Dad’s favorite color, and even more sprinkles, because Maya loves sprinkles and they wouldn’t stick to her non-iced portion of the cake. They did help me get the cake baked, iced, and decorated, and they seemed to truly enjoy presenting it to Sean.

Sean isn’t known to be terrifically expressive, but I believe he enjoyed his weekend. The kids were pretty well-behaved, for them. The dinner was delicious, the movie was fun, the cake was moist and obviously well-decorated. And the kids got to think a little about taking care of their Dad for a change.