Heather 101 by Jack Weyland

Author:Jack Weyland [Weyland, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Extreme Daddy Time

Heather asked me to go Christmas shopping at the mall with her. Basically, that means I follow her around, and when she asks, “What do you think about this for _____?” my job is to say, “Oh, yeah, that’d be perfect! Great idea!”

At the end of the three-hour-long process, she suggested we get some hot chocolate and split a cinnamon roll.

As we ate, she said, “The boys are always telling me they wish they could spend more time with you.”

“I do lots of things with them.”

“Like what?”

“Family home evening . . . family prayer . . . dinner.”

“But those things are with me as well. They need time with just you. They won’t always want to spend time with you, but they do now. A few days ago Kevin watched a Christmas show where a father took his son into the woods to chop down a Christmas tree. He told me he wanted to do that with you.”

“But we have a perfectly good fake Christmas tree.”

“Aren’t you just a little concerned that he talked to me about what he wanted to do with you, but he didn’t ask you about it?”

I sighed. “Yeah, that’s probably not good.”

“I’ve checked into it,” she said. “There’s a place about twenty miles from here where you can get a permit to chop down a Christmas tree. I took the liberty of downloading the information, filling out the form, and paying the fee.”

“You did all this without checking with me to see if I even wanted to do it?”

“I know how busy you are this time of year.” She handed me the permit. “This Saturday might be a good time for you to do that with the boys. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”

I felt like I’d been conned into doing something I really didn’t want to do.

“I just want my boys to know what a wonderful man their dad is,” she said.

Oh sure, she had to throw that in my face. I sighed. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

On Saturday morning I got up at seven to get ready for our excursion. I thought I’d have to get the boys up, but they were already dressed and ready to go.

“What do you want for breakfast?” I asked them.

“We already ate,” Kevin said. “I got Benjamin and Jimmy up, helped them get dressed, and then I gave them some cereal. We’re ready to go.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised and also, a little intimidated, wondering how I was going to make this worth the effort they’d already put into it.

They sat on the edge of their chairs and watched me eat.

“Boys, we’re going to have a good time, okay? But this might not be as exciting as you think it will be. Life is often like that, you know. You think something is going to be so much fun, but when you actually do it, you find out it wasn’t that great.”

“I wish we could take a sleigh with horses to get the tree,” Kevin said.

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