Daddy Daughter Week, 2019

After spending 5 days in Iowa visiting family, Jessica and Enzo returned home today. The girls and I had a great week while they were away, but we were all very excited to be getting them back home with us. Jessica will soon be writing a post about their trip, but on her behalf I’ll just say that they had a great time. It was a bummer that Enzo got the stomach flu while they were away, but the whole point of the trip was to get quality time with family, and she definitely got that. She was able to get a bunch of time with her grandparents, her dad, her brother, and others. The trip really meant a lot to her and I’m so glad we were able to make it work.

Since the girls and I weren’t going to be able to travel with them, my goal for the week was to stay busy and have fun. I made sure we had something going on each weeknight after school, and a really busy day on Saturday. I wanted it to be a special week with fun activities, more than usual eating out, etc., so it worked out perfectly that our 2nd annual Daddy Daughter dance was on the Friday night that they were away.

Since their flight was so early on Tuesday morning, we ended up driving Jessica and Enzo to a hotel near the airport on Monday night. Elise had been battling a stomach flu over the weekend, but made it to school fine on Monday, so I thought she was past it. We got them up to their room, enjoyed the view of the airport for a minute, then said our goodbyes. The plan for the remainder of the week was for me to work from home and basically just get the girls to the bus stop in the morning, then pick them up at the bus stop each afternoon. In between that I’d have 7 straight hours of uninterrupted work time at the house. A day before their trip, we bought a brand new bed at Costco, so Jessica only got to sleep on it once before leaving. Since I couldn’t possibly need so much sleeping real estate, I told the girls they could sleep in the new bed with me while Mommy was away.

Our first morning didn’t exactly start as planned. I was thinking I’d get up early each morning and get an hour of work done before the girls woke up, but it quickly became obvious it wasn’t going to work that way. I was trying to get them ready for school and suddenly Elise is rushing to the bathroom to throw up. I thought she’d gotten past it over the weekend, but no such luck. She threw up a few times and was looking really pale, so I had no choice but to keep her home from school. Then Ava’s running around upstairs trying to get ready for school, and ends up slamming her toe into a little wooden stool in our bathroom. She hit it so hard that I think she fractured it. So here we are on our first morning of Mom being away and I’ve got one kid puking with diarrhea and the other has a broken toe! I’m like, are you kidding me?

So yeah, things got off to a little bit of a rough start. Suddenly may day of quiet uninterrupted work time was gone because I had Elise home from school, and Ava practically had to hop to the bus stop. Her toe ended up bothering her for a few days, but she had no problem with it at hockey practice on Thursday, so I think she’s good now. Luckily for me Elise slept most of the day, and seemed way better that evening, so she didn’t end up missing any more school that week.

Overall we had a really good week, but it still had it’s challenges. Each time we did a video chat with Mom and Enzo it would make them really sad. They had a hard time understanding why they would go on “vacation” without us, so I kept trying to explain that it wasn’t a vacation, it was a trip to visit family, and that they couldn’t be missing a week of school right now. Jessica could tell the calls were making them sad, so we started doing them less frequently as the week went on.

I think the hardest point for me was on Wednesday night. We were doing a call with Mom right before bedtime, and Ava suddenly realized she had to go to the bathroom really badly, but didn’t want to hang up with Mom. So we finish the conversation and Ava runs to the bathroom to pee, but she didn’t turn the light on, didn’t notice that the seat cover was down, sat on the closed seat cover, and relieved herself. Obviously this created a huge mess. Ava was now soaked in her own pee, and there was pee all over the bathroom. I was upset. Ava assured me she would clean it up herself, which was borderline insulting. So yeah, that was tough, and throughout the week as I was mentally outlining this blog post, I was thinking of this experience as “the big cleanup” part of our week, but oh no, there would be more. I’m just glad I waited until today to write this post.

Although this is painfully obvious, I’m going to say it anyway – it’s always really difficult to even attempt to replace Mom (for any family) when she is away. Even if you’re Dad, replacing Mom is impossible. In my particular case, I wasn’t taking time off work or anything like that, so I basically had to do all my normal stuff, plus do my best to do all the things Jessica does for them. I don’t normally dress them, or pack lunches, or do their laundry, so it certainly gives you a lot of extra appreciation for what your spouse does after walking a mile in their shoes. It also gives you so much respect for single parents. In fact, the main reason I couldn’t get up and start work early each morning was because I was completely exhausted each night. Solo parenting is just really hard, so props to everyone that does this all the time.

Although there were multiple highlights throughout the week, like eating out at various restaurants, seeing the new Lego movie at the theater yesterday, and going to dance class together (Ava is now enrolled in Elise’s Wednesday night dance class and they love doing it together), there’s no question that the biggest highlight of the week was attending our 2nd annual Daddy Daughter dance.

Last year the dance we attended was being put on as a fundraiser for a local high school, but they didn’t do it this year. I actually thought we weren’t going to be able to go, but then we found one being put on at Gold Creek church, which is only about a mile from the house. We’ve been there for Trunk Or Treat before, and the event was being put on by Mom’s rather than high schoolers, so I figured it would be good.

Like last year, we started the evening off with dinner at Calabria, which is a nice little Italian restaurant near our neighborhood. The girls love going there and think it’s so fancy. I love going there because they have 4 veal dishes on the menu. I told them if they ate their dinners we could get a piece of chocolate cake for dessert, so they held up their end of the bargain and I held mine. Later in the evening I would ask them what their favorite part of the night was, and although the dance was a mutual favorite, the chocolate cake was an honorable mention by both.

The dance included a raffle for various prizes, so along with our dance tickets I purchased 6 raffle tickets. After surveying the potential prizes, we decided to put all 6 tickets into the American Girl doll bucket, however this ended up being the most desireable prize and unfortunately our number didn’t get called. Elise was pretty upset about it, which I understood and consoled her on, but other than this the night was pure fun. They had an arts & crafts table that the girls had fun at, each decorating their own gold star. There was an area for photos, and of course a big dance floor with lots of balloons, cupcakes, and punch. We danced quite a bit, enjoyed cupcakes (which were totally unnecessary after that chocolate cake), and even ran into a couple friends from school.

Obviously these are the kinds of things you remember forever so I’m glad to be able to start making a tradition of it, and again the timing was perfect with Mom and Enzo being out of town. While the girls loved the dancing and chocolate cake, my main memories of that night will be Elise’s beautiful colorful sparkly dress that she picked out especially for this night (she kept getting compliments from other little girls), and Ava doing all these hilarious dances and chicken impressions. She had me laughing pretty much all evening.

With Mom and Enzo arriving Sunday morning, and the clocks jumping an hour forward due to Daylight Savings Time, we decided to go to bed early on Saturday night. Elise hadn’t shown any signs of the stomach flu since Tuesday morning, so I thought she was 100%, but then at 1:30am I woke up to that sound someone makes when they’re about to throw up. It almost sounds like they’re breathing into a paper bag. I heard this and instinctively jumped out of bed. Poor Elise wasn’t even awake and she just starts puking all over herself in bed. Our brand new bed, that is. More importantly of course, is the fact that people die this way all the time, so I’m really glad I was right there.

I immediately got her out of bed and we started rushing to the bathroom, but we couldn’t even make it out of the bedroom before she doubled over and vomited again all over the carpet. We’ve had situations like this before, but never when I was solo parenting. You kinda go into crisis mode because you know there’s all these things that need to happen immediately. Luckily Ava was right there by my side, ready to help however she could. She went and picked out new clothes for Elise while I got her into the shower, then kept Elise company while I dealt with the bedding and carpet cleaning.

The unfortunate reality with the timing of all this was that due to Daylight Savings Time (which I hate and want abolished), this whole ordeal took up an hour of our night, yet 2 hours had technically passed on the clock. By the time we were laying back down to go to sleep, it was 3:30am. Consequently we had a bit of a hard time getting up and out of the house this morning. This combined with the fact that Mom and Enzo’s flight arrived 20 minutes early, meant they had to wait just a bit for us to scoop them up at SeaTac.

Seeing them and having them home was great, and I was surprised at how good Enzo looked considering how sick he was for most of their trip. I’ll leave it up to Jessica to describe, but she said he threw up more this week at Rick’s house than all three of them combined in their lifetimes. Poor little guy, I could tell in the photos she was sending that he was really pale, but when I got him at the airport he came running up to hug me. I don’t think I’ve ever squeezed him so tight. I’m sure it will take a couple days for everyone to get back to normal, but for now it’s great to have them home, and I’m so glad Jessica got everything out of the trip she was hoping for.

Considering how I left off my last post, with my car crashed in a woman’s driveway in the middle of a snowstorm, I feel like an update on that front is appropriate. Basically the way it turned out is my car sat there for 11 days! It was a combination of the weather, the hill she lived on, and other scheduling aspects, so it ended up taking 11 days to get a tow truck out there to take my car away. As expected, the car was determined to be totaled, and I’ll just say I was surprised (in a good way) with what Progressive ended up giving me for it.

Since I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself in the car market, I decided to start things off by getting in touch with my old friend Randall Nakamura. We worked together for years in the restaurant industry, but our history goes back even further, as both of my parents were friends with Randall’s dad George back in the day. He was a regular at the Riverside, which was a card room both of my parents worked at when I was young.

Randall and I have always been good friends, and like myself, he decided to get out of the restaurant industry after settling down and having a family. His wife Brie is also an old friend of mine, so there’s a lot of history there. Randall ended up getting into the luxury car sales business several years ago and has been at BMW Seattle for the past 4 years. Although I loved the idea of buying a car from him, it definitely took some convincing on Jessica’s part for me to buy something as nice as I ended up with.

I was definitely feeling guilty about the accident and not really feeling like I deserved a nice car after everything that had just happened. I figured I’d just start by talking to Randall, catch up a bit, and go from there. As it turned out they had a sport wagon that I loved, and after a lot of convincing by Jessica, I went for it.

So I ended up getting a 2015 BMW 328i sport wagon with Xdrive, which is BMW’s all wheel drive system. It’s black sapphire with Dakota red leather interior, and only had 23,000 miles on it. Apparently someone had it on a lease and didn’t drive it much before returning it. All I can say is I absolutely love the car, and it’s easily my favorite car I’ve ever owned. It is truly a driver’s car, and I look forward to getting into it everyday. I love the look of it (inside and out), the iDrive technology system is excellent, it has a beautiful panoramic glass roof, and the handling is amazing. It’s a turbo 4 cylinder putting out 240hp, so it’s fast, but not crazy fast. It’s the handling the gets you, and the smooth ride, especially at high speeds.

When I first took it out on a test drive Randall said “Wait until you see how smooth this thing is at 100mph.” I’m like “100, are you kidding? I haven’t driven 100 in 10 years.” He said that in his line of work, it’s par for the course. He explained that these cars are engineered to run at triple digit speeds on the Autobahn all day long, and be as smooth as butter doing so. His personal record on a test drive was 153mph in an M5 (the customer was driving), which is the fastest production sedan in the world. Where you do that in the Seattle area is beyond me though…

So I obliged him on an open stretch of freeway, got to 100 for about a two-Mississippi count before letting off, and yeah, it’s incredible how smooth it is at speed. Although I haven’t reach that speed again since then, I do have to be careful because the car wants to do at least 80 every time you get on the freeway, and it’s so deceiving. You simply don’t realize you’re going 80 because everything is so smooth and under control. I’m generally a very slow and safe driver, but this car has definitely revitalized my love and appreciation of cars. Consequently I switched things up while Jessica was away by parking the van outside and keeping the BMW in the garage. I can tell I’m going to baby it even more than I normally do with cars, but to me a car like this deserves that extra bit of care and attention. I’m definitely thankful to have it, thankful to still be here after that crazy accident, and determined to not practice stunt driving again anytime soon.

That’s pretty much it for now. Ava’s hockey season is winding to an end, but we will be joining the travel team for the end-of-year tournament up in Richmond, B.C. at the end or March. It will be a fun way to wrap up our first complete season, and I’m already set on being an assistant coach next season.

I should probably mention that although I was planning on travelling to Japan this Spring with some friends, we ended up having to postpone the trip. It’s still going to happen, but I’m not sure exactly when. It’s all good though, as there are always plenty of good things going on in our world to look forward to. One particularly exciting thing for me is that I get the honor of standing up as a groomsman for my cousin Kristy’s wedding in October. Her fiance Beto surprised me by asking, but I was honored and more than happy to accept. The girls are thrilled that they’ll get to attend their first wedding, although Ava has already proclaimed that she will not be watching when they kiss.

Before I go I just want to thank my sweet girls for making this such a fun and memorable week. They’re growing so fast, and I realize the day is coming where they might not be so excited to spend time with me, so the need to cherish these times isn’t lost on me. They will always be my babies and my sweethearts, but they will only be at this current stage for a short time. I love them both more than I can describe, and couldn’t be more proud to be their Daddy.