December | 2020 | Fight For Their Hearts

Here is an easy win for next week! I’m posting this during the Christmas break so you can do breakfast, lunch, or dinner with one of your kids. You might have already had your kids help cook a meal, after all, it’s a good life lesson to teach, but have you done it intentionally? Have you done it as a way to spend some quality time with one of your kids and plan it from start to finish?

You’ll need to clear some time on the calendar, not only to cook, but to shop for what you need. First, decide on the meal. You could do this on your own and already have gathered the supplies, but deciding together is part of the fun. Look through cookbooks, if you have those, or google some recipes. Let you daughter come up with some ideas that she thinks would be fun and taste good. If she has a strict macaroni and cheese palate, then look for a great recipe and make it from scratch. You’ll still need to weigh in on the final menu. Letting the kids have input is one of the main things, but you also need to be able to pull it off. Baked Alaska may not be an ideal choice (side note: I don’t know what Baked Alaska is, but it’s supposed to be hard to make).

Going to the grocery store is going to be part of this journey. Sure you could have it delivered or order online, but part of the fun will be finding the ingredients together. This can also be a great life lesson about the cost of food for a family!

We had a pretty simple dinner when we did this. We grilled some chicken (which was another life lesson of how to use a grill), made a salad, sautéed some broccoli, and made garlic bread. For some reason it just tasted a little better than normal!

Finally, there is the dreaded clean up. We did a lot of clean up along the way while we were cooking which made it a bit easier. One pro tip I can offer is to make sure your kids know before everything begins that cleaning up is part of the process.

This is such an easy dad/daughter date and you can do it this week! Have fun and if you decide to go ahead and make the Baked Alaska, send me a picture!

It’s been a while since I posted a blog. We have continued to do things, but when Covid locked everything down, we had to get more creative. We couldn’t do as many ticketed events. My music-loving daughter and I have already had two different concerts postponed, so it’s just made things different.

I’ll still post some of the things we did during this crazy 2020 year, because most of what we did has been transferable to any time. This past week we did something really easy. Mini golf (or if you grew up with the brand . . . Putt Putt). When I was a kid, my biological dad would come pick me up from time to time and ask what I wanted to do for the day. I’m not sure why he asked, because he said “No” to every one of my ideas until I got to Putt Putt. That was how we put the “fun” in dysfunction 🙂

So it’s a third generation thing now in my family

You probably didn’t need this blog to give you the idea, but the hope is that if you haven’t done something together as a family or with your kids one-on-one that this could inspire you to an easy win.

My family tends to be pretty competitive so here are some thoughts if your family is like ours:

1. Play against yourself

I have a distinct advantage over my elementary school kiddo. I’m older. I’ve played a lot more. I didn’t line up for my first putt with the club backwards like she did. She was convinced she was going to beat me though, so we had to do a little redirection. We played the course twice and set the competition at doing better the second time than we did the first time.

2. Incentivize some holes

You win $1 for every hole you par, $5 for a birdie, $10 for an eagle.
Every hole that Dad doesn’t par gets the kid a stroke off of their score.
Kid gets par and dad has to play the next hole with his weak hand.
Hole in one wins a car (They do it at golf tournaments so be the greatest dad ever)

3. Come up with a different rule for each hole