No Super Bowl
My wife wanted to go to her sister’s house to watch the Super Bowl because it may give us the best chance of watching the game. It was a fun thought, but the reality was much different. Nevertheless, we prepared for it and headed over there once our 1 year old son L woke up from his afternoon nap.
When we got there, the house was packed with people. There was probably 50 people there and the game had already started. Before kids, I usually always saw the kickoff. With kids, we saw the Seattle Seahawks score a field goal to start things off. Still kicking, but different context.
We tried to feed the kids and settle them downstairs with the rest of the younger guests, but L did not want to comply. My 7 year old daughter E was playing with her cousin and I tried to get them to watch L. I warned them not to let him climb up the stairs and as a good parent, I pretended to leave and observe. Within less than 30 seconds, they stopped paying attention to L and he was…climbing up the stairs. I went over and was attached to him for the rest of the half.
L wanted to play with balls, food, markers, and all kinds of things. I was drawing with him and half paying attention to the game with what remaining attention I had. I had to draw a lot of buses and L crossed them out by scribbling all over it. Luckily for me, E was off and playing, so it was only down to L and my 5 year old son C.
C wanted to play soccer in the house with me. When I was busy with L, C would end up watching the older kids play video games. When he was not watching video games, he was crawling under and next to the other kids and bothering them. It was funny at first, but them got bothersome. I asked him to stop and he periodically did before going back there. My wife ended up coming downstairs to watch the halftime show and help with the kids.
After halftime, she took L while I played with C in a long hallway. I came up with the game where you had to strike the ball hard and straight all the way down the hallway. If the ball hit the back wall before hitting a side wall, you got a point. First person to 10 wins. I won the first and second time we played, but it was surprisingly close. C is a good striker and he loves playing soccer. He wanted to keep playing, so the third game, we ended up playing to almost 40 because there were a lot of ties. He had so much fun playing the game and I didn’t watch any of the second half until the very end.
I had the genius idea of streaming the game from my phone on Peacock. What I realized was that my stream was almost a full minute ahead of the TV feeds, so one time I screamed out interception before anyone in the house knew. Since I was downstairs, the kids who were watching got confused…until they saw the interception and laughed. Then the upstairs feed was a few seconds behind the downstairs feed and they all started screaming interception last. C had a good laugh at that.
By the end of the game, I was ready to go home and get the kids in bed. I didn’t watch much of the game, but left with a night full of memories with C and L. I’m not sure if they will remember much from the evening other than they had fun with their Daddy. Maybe C will want to keep playing the soccer game we made up also and I hope we don’t play it at our house so nothing breaks. Although the night didn’t go exactly how I was expecting, that’s parenthood for you and as long as the kids had fun while getting into bed on time, that’s all that matters.
