Raindrops on Roses and Sleep

I learned something new about myself on this fine Father's Day.


In school last week Kiernan and his classmates worked on special message sheets for Dads. The above sheet was his work, for me, obviously. See if you can spot the new thing I learned about myself.

Yesterday was a great Father's Day, with one major exception. Wendy had to go out of town early in the morning, so the whole family was not together. But Kiernan was absolutely amazing to me all day long. Not that he's usually difficult. He's quite a good kid. On Father's Day, however, he was another level of cool. Opening doors for me and being extra careful not to ask for his way or to whine or sulk when he didn't get his way. It was really neat watching him think through this. A few times I could literally see him stop himself from reacting a certain way, smile, and then go about his business.

We got up and immediately headed out for the day as I was performing in a show at eleven. The show was Legends of King Arthur, which I've posted about here before and which I perform at some point most every year. Usually I will beg off the gig if Wendy is going to be out of town, but for some reason we got our wires crossed and I ended up taking the work. I'm glad I did, because we had a great time. One of our wonderful sitters, Nicole, met us up at the theatre as I had to rehearse for two hours before the show, and then do the show. So she entertained Kiernan during that time and sat with him during the show.

He used to be fairly reserved about volunteering to be in my Creative PlayGround shows (Creative PlayGround is the name of the theatre company). Almost all of our shows are performed in the round with the audience seated on the stage with us. Opportunities for the kids to be involved abound. Last year Kiernan volunteered to be part of the dragon tail--Max the Dragon is one of the characters I play in the show--and he loved it so much he let me know beforehand he'd be volunteering for this again. So...cool.

However, the audience turned out to be of moderately small size and were fairly shy, so Kiernan ended up volunteering for two other parts in the show as well. He just jumped right in and contributed. I was so proud. Great Father's Day present.

Nicole has promised to email me some pictures from the day. She took pictures with her camera and took some video with our little Flip video camera. When I get the pictures from her I'll post them, and once I get the video off the Flip I'll throw some of that up on here too. I'll send out updates when I do this.

In the meantime, here's another picture from the day. This is from dinner, and really this moment made me feel like the luckiest Dad in the world.

As we set the table for dinner, Kiernan said, "Dad, since it's Father's Day, you get to choose what we do during dinner."

I thought for a moment and said, "Well, then I choose writing in my journal while you read." I needed to transcribe a bunch of film notes for a podcast I do Sunday nights, and I figured dinner time outside on this lovely day would be a good time to get a start on that. [We have a family rule that if only one parent is at dinner with Kiernan, reading is allowed at the table.]

Kiernan had other ideas. "Cool!" He ran off to his room to get a book.

Then he proceeded to spend the entire meal reading this book out loud to me. I didn't get to transcribe my notes...and I couldn't have cared less. I just sat there, eating my salad and getting read to by my awesome, awesome boy. The picture above is him doing just that. The book: Stink and the Great Guinea Pig Express.

So great.