Weekend Round-Up: Father's Day Edition

Mayun, what a busy weekend. Some random observations:

**We've developed a habit of taking the Llama-ettes out for one-on-one breakfasts on Saturday morning. Since there are two of us and three of them, it's a six week cycle. This week was my turn with the three year old. I've noticed that I sometimes get rather odd looks from people as I sit there with the gels, as if they're trying to figure out if I'm Mr. Divorcee and this is my visitation weekend. I'm sometimes tempted to jump up and yell, "No, no! It's just breakfast! The Missus is at home with the other two! Honest!"

**Saturday afternoon, the eldest Llama-ette went to one birthday party while the other two went to another. Immediately those parties were over, the two older girls went on to another birthday party, this one a sleepover at a neighbor's house. Such is the social whirlwind in which we operate.

I went along with the eldest to her first party, which was held at a putt-putt golf course. She was one of only two girls there, but enjoyed herself nonetheless. Somehow or other I got drafted as Official Cameraman of the tourney, so found myself scurrying back and forth among three foursomes of small kids, trying to snap at least one shot of each one at the tee.

Later on, the kids had the ritual pizza and cake under a tent. It was a Star Wars theme banquet and featured one of the more bizarre cakes I've seen, one designed to look like the lava field in ROTS, complete with flames done in icing. In the middle of it sat Darth Vader's head and upper chest, as if he was partially submerged in molten rock. It had a slightly unsettling, although I'm sure unintentional, effect, although apparently I was the only one who thought so. As I sat there, I got musing about what other big movie scenes could be depicted on birthday cakes - Omaha Beach from Saving Private Ryan? The Titanic going down? Manhattan frozed solid in The Day After Tomorrow? (My musings may have been slightly lurid because I had spent an industrious hour or so before the party giving the whiteflies what for and, in the process, inhaling rayther a lot of malathion fumes. Mmmmmm....toxic spray....mmmmm.)

** Speaking of movies, the Missus and I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith Saturday night. It was okay - sort of a cross between James Bond and the Thin Man - and some of the bickering-couple jokes were quite amusing, but as a whole it wasn't as entertaining as it could have been and the ending left a lot hanging. I will say that Angelina Jolie was looking pretty fine. I'm not sure if I'd put her on my Freebie List, but she would at least get serious consideration. Some brilliant couple brought an eight or nine year old boy to the show. He sat right behind us and kept asking questions. In one scene, Jolie dresses up as a dominatrix in order to get at an illegal arms merchant who she, as a professional assassin, is supposed to kill. She indulges him with a riding crop for a few seconds before breaking his neck. Good luck explaining that to a nine year old.

** Of course, we paid dearly yesterday for all the Saturday birthday party celebration - the two older gels came home exhausted. The three year old, meanwhile, had conned the babysitter into letting her stay up late while we were out for dinner and the movie. It's interesting how that level of tiredness affects different personalities, laying bare the Enemy Within. The eldest gets extremely tempermental, the five year old starts whining and the three year old, well, she becomes something of a berserker, taunting and teasing even more than usual. And I won't even begin to describe her own personal form of bio-terror, except to say that we wind up going through a whoooole lot of undies.

**All of this hurly-burly made this article in this weekend's WaPo magazine especially, well, teeth-grinding. In an effort to get just the right tone for Father's Day, I suppose, the article tells the tale of a woman in Massachusetts who decided to track down the anonymous sperm doner who fathered her seven and three year old children, then fly out to California with the kids in order to meet him and, for lack of a better word, bond.

Now I'm rather agnostic over the whole business of sperm banks, with the attendant issues surrounding doner identification and how and when one goes about explaining all this to the kid. I suppose there are all sorts of circumstances involved, each case requiring its own determination of what is appropriate. What got me about this particular story was the woman's hell-bent effort to create what amounts to Insta-Dad. Here we have a man she's never even laid eyes on before, much less anything else. She goes all the way across country with her two small children and stays with them in this guy's apartment. Not only that, she immediately turns over a significant amount of parental authority to the guy and starts working hard to get the kids to call him "Dad".

[Activate Rant Function.] I'm sorry, but this is insane, and not just because the woman in the article seems to have some serious judgement problems with respect to blind trust. This man may be the kids' father, but he is not, repeat not, their Dad. The former is a simple matter of biological fact. The latter is an intensely complex jumble of physical, intellectual and emotional bonds, built up over years and years of day-to-day close contact. It is something that cannot come about instantly, no matter how hard somebody may want it. And furthermore, it doesn't come about because the guy takes the kids to the aquarium and Disney Land and wears matching "Best Buddies" t-shirts with them. I'm sick to death of the notion that fatherhood is all about "sharing special moments" with children. That's a bunch of crap. Being a Dad means getting to have good times with your kids, of course, but it also - and much more importantly - means being their teacher, their counselor, their coach, their judge, their jury and, on occassion, their firing squad. This is a full time job and frankly, as someone who has devoted more energy to it than I ever knew I even had, I am deeply offended, no mortified, that this woman believes all the fatherly needs that she dimly perceives her children have can somehow be instantly gratified by a sudden visit to Mr. Doner. I'm not saying that Mr. Doner couldn't become Dad some day, but he isn't yet . (Judging by the article, I'd say he is at best ambivalent about seriously taking on the responsibility, btw.) This wretched woman is deluding herself if she really thinks he is. [Deactivate Rant Function.]