This is episode eight of the Ask Dad Labs podcast recorded on April 22 2021. It's simple. You ask questions and dad's answer. When we need actual answers. We do find the experts. Today we have clay from Austin, Texas. He has kids that are aged from high school up through the Coast Guard. And we have Nick from Louisville, Kentucky. He has two kids, ages six and 13. And I'm Ben, I'm in the Detroit River just south of Detroit, Michigan. My boys are 11 and just about to turn 13. Let's get to the show. So Nick, has your physical therapist suggested lunges, because because mine did, and that's just a really big step for me.
Oh my god.
One, one small step for Dad Labs.
Yeah,
one. Step Four.
I got me on that one. I didn't see that.
Really? Yeah,
I didn't. Wow. Okay. It's been a while. I've heard it. It's been a long time since I've heard that one. pt is going well, by the way. Yes. Thank you.
Is it Yeah,
it's all going very, very well. No problems. I'm to weight training. Now. I'm pushing more weights. range of motion is fantastic. Right where I should be 12 weeks out. But yeah, they still kick my ass. So yeah. But that's what's going on for me. But you clay, what's going on your life?
Well, yesterday, I took my youngest to get his second immunization, which was pretty exciting. That's it. So he's got two weeks, and then he'll be fully immunized. So that was that was pretty exciting. My daughter got to play in an actual field hockey game in college last week, night. And that was really exciting for us. Because you know, we're all about the sports ball neck. And it was just very exciting to see her take the field and have her college uniform on and play with a team that's just meant so much to her. That was super exciting. Afterwards, she was just a wreck. She was like, I didn't play well. I didn't. I don't like you know what was going on. And I was like, Really? Really? I mean, after a year of this stuff, like just being on the field. I didn't say of course, didn't write word of this out loud. Yeah, what I'm thinking is, Wow, really, you know that after a year and a half of waiting for a moment like this and and and then to finally get the play and then be like, Oh, shit, man, I wish I played better.
But that tells you how dedicated she is to and how bad she wants to play. Well, I mean, that's she she does she that's an athlete. That's, that's an athlete for you.
Yeah, yeah. So it's all good. My, my oldest son, one of the things that I've had on my mind a lot lately, right now, I'm totally obsessed with my grandparents strategy. You know, what it takes, like, once you have adult kids, like kids that are fully grown, to like, get them to want to engage with you, again, is kind of on my mind, like that's the phase of parenting. So my oldest son sent me a snapshot, he lives in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and send me a snapshot that he and a friend had just kind of on a lark, gone to Yosemite, and had done some hikes and ended up, you know, with some beautiful views of Half Dome and sent me a picture of him in Yosemite. And this is kind of the random experience of being a guy with, you know, adult children, like, when they decide to check in, you know, you get these miraculous moments of, of joy, like, oh, wow, that's so cool that you're doing that. You know, why he's doing that? But it leads me to think like, well, how am I gonna do that? You know, how, how do I engage in and build stuff with my adult, you know, kids, get them back here, do stuff with them out where they are, that's all going to be engaging. At the same time. One of my old college roommates, like reached out to me randomly in the same days, like, hey, you're not getting any younger, you fat ass, we need to go. And he's a climber. He's like, I need to take you to Yosemite. And we're going to go climb some of this shit. And I was like, wow, Jim, interesting that you would propose this to me this week. I just got a photo from my son from Yosemite. And now I'm guys, I'm terrified. Because this is a guy that like it's not I'm not talking about. Let's go for a hike, he's like, no, let's put on the harness. There's some multi-phase climbs. I may have to belay you down some places, like Believe me down. You're a he's a stick. He's like, you know? Yeah 165 5% body fat asshole. Lay me for one second you little
twig.
It's all about the that's the equipment and technique data and got nothing to do with how big he is, man. I know, I got to do it. It's gonna be awesome.
I find it to be super epic. If I could just get over all my own anxiety and fear. Like I'm not a heights guy. I don't want to. But this is something that Wilson's really into. This guy just like suddenly came into my life and said, Hey, we should go do this. And now what? I've got to go do that.
Just just for that possible in with Wilson. Yeah. Dude, it's, I mean, sounds like he knows what he's doing. I believe that he will be safe. I've been climbing and rappelling with some people that looking back on it was sketchy as all get out.
This guy when he was in college, it was kind of just coming in it. And
okay, well,
you know, now he's like a venture capitalist in fucking San Francisco. I'm sure he's a total genius. Anyway,
he's a climber that's not dead.
Yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah.
is the ultimate qualification.
Don't do any free climbing,
free climbing. Dude, I just, I just want to sit and have a beer and watch them do it. But that's not the way it's gonna work. Now, it's gonna be about timing. Because you know, Wilson, he knows when he goes, he deploys he deploys in August. There. His next deployment is a long one. He's not back until October. And really, it's about well, in October, he can't do 70 because it's starting to snow. And they close things right? You have to do it. So he was the My friend was saying, oh, could you do it in August? And, and so I don't know, I guess I'm gonna have to try and figure out a way to do that. But this is what you do. This is what you're doing. When your kids get to be adults. Like, how do you get those opportunities to really engage with them in some really meaningful way, even though it takes you totally out of your comfort zone, which is 100% where I'm going to be with this.
Dude, I'm trying to engage with a 13 year old and failing miserably. So I'm all dude. I'm glad you have older kids, because now I can watch you and go either take notes or go Oh, shit, don't do that.
This is consistently my girl, right? Right company, go out there and fail quite publicly, and then just share that with people to see how they you know, if they want to do that, or not.
That's what DadLabs is all about, man. Thanks. So you don't have to? Yeah. Right.
Sort of on the topic of engagement. You know, my parents just came up from Columbus. So they drove up about three hours to come up here for my son's birthday. Turns 13 on Tuesday, and this is not out of out of the ordinary for them. We lived about three and a half hours away when we lived down in Indiana. And one day after, you know, a Sunday Sunday on our way home from church I think it was I got a text. Hey, we're on our way home from church. Do you mind if we stopped by so they were on their way home from church three and a half hours away? And send a text as if they were on their way past anyway? Yeah. Like, you know, they decided to go to church five hours away that Sunday and right. And so they just, you know, extended their trip home from 15 minutes to four hours. And they came over, you know, and just like tonight, they they came up and bought us dinner and then went home and they even paid paid the bridge toll to get to us. So
Can Can we think about like our plan is grandparents. One of the things I've noticed about grandkids is that thing, it's like, Hey, we just driven eight hours. I don't want to bother you guys. So we're just gonna hang out for like 20 minutes. And then we don't want to get in anybody's way. So we're gonna just drive nine hours home. Yeah, like that is such a grandparent move. What is that? Yeah,
I don't plan on doing that her parents Alice's parents will. They're five hours away. And they will give us about a two hour warning when they when they hit like Columbus, Indiana, sometimes they'll call us about an hour out. And we're like, Hey, we're about to hit the bridge. And, you know, we want to go to dinner at Cracker Barrel, always Cracker Barrel, right off the highway, and it's five minutes from our house. They do it all the time. And we're like, Look, guys, if you give us a day, at least, we'll have you at the house, we'll cook dinner
together, everybody relaxed, but
now they do that all the time.
How about that? Would that be crazy?
I mean, I can't imagine just doing that. I mean, I understand not wanting to be a burden. I mean, it's kind of my life in general, I don't want to bother anybody. I want everybody and I want everybody to leave me alone. So I get that part of it. But I want to hang out with my kids. You know, now she's one of six. So maybe they don't want to hang out? Or maybe it's me, they might want to hang out with her and they just don't wanna hang out with me. I don't know. But yeah, it's grandparents do that they, my mom will come by and sit for hours and talk
granddad labs. The truth is, I'm so close to that. This, this show is really my transition from dad, granddad labs, really,
we're getting a pool renovation done, actually guys come in tomorrow to get concrete for us. kind of the opposite direction. But in talking about the pool, you know, we're spending a lot of money on this pool. And my wife keeps thinking, what what are we going to downsize to, you know, we've got, we actually have a moderately sized house, our house before this was huge. This one's moderate. And a nice big pool. And my wife keeps talking about, you know, we're going to get a condo in the city are we going to now she's she's super introverted, and doesn't want to see people. So her the idea of her moving to the city is really funny to me. But, and here, you know, we can do this, but we've got this giant pool. And she's like, Oh, we don't want to take care of all that anymore. We don't want all these extra bedrooms. And, and I finally had to stop her, you know, realize our boys are in our house for another seven years, at least. Right? Well, you know, before they go to college, yeah. And then they'll be out of here, most of the time, you will want them to come back here. If in seven years, we move to a condo, and we don't have a place for them to stay. They won't come back, you know, we're telling them not to come back, we have a pool that's big enough for a party of adult, you know, adult or high school kids. And it will certainly be big enough for grandkids. And so we live in a ranch. So there's no concern about stairs. So why, you know, why do we want to move from here, this seems like the perfect place we can get a dock and get a boat even and draw them even more. So our goal is instead of going out, we want to have the place where everybody wants to go. Right, right.
Like Cape Cod is for you. Very important, strategic, you know, decisions, you know, creating the place that the kids want to come back to. Right? Is
it all it has, it has a lot to do with the type of parenting philosophy that you have. And, and and the relationship you have with your children. You know, some people are we're not wanting to be parents but still became parents and not saying they're not. They're bad parents. But they've done their 18 years. They've done their time. they've served their sentence. And now the kid you know, empty nesters, they're like, Okay, I'm getting a small place or we're getting an RV and we're traveling and we'll see you when you see when we see it. Nothing wrong with that particular philosophy. I am not of that philosophy. I'm not like 18 good you're out of here. I'm not bad at all. I might be like 18 you get a job. But you're welcome here as long as you want to be here. And I know that eventually you'll have a relationship but you will not want to live at your parents house anymore. You know, we talked about Renton tearing down the garage, rebuilding it and putting it an apartment above the garage for the kids with seven year gap between them. He will move out of that before the girl is ready to move into it. We haven't put any solid plans together for that. But we are totally cool with. I don't mind having the adult kid live with me. Yeah, I'm not I'm not gonna give him any shit about that. I'm not gonna give her any shit about that. I know they won't do that forever. But just life doesn't work that way. But I'm not kicking them out anytime.
It's interesting. To think about them what you said about trying to create this kind of long term vision for what not only serves your family now, but then what serves a family, once they've left, and you try, you want to try and bring them back. And you know, my wife, and I've never owned a home, we don't own our current home. And where we live, which is where the kids want to come back to Austin, Texas, is now we're pretty much priced out of the market. And, you know, I'd thought for a while Oh, man, it would be so cool to have a lake house, maybe that the kids would want to come back to you know, but, you know, you guys have seen what's happened, you know, nationally, to real estate in Austin, Texas has been particularly acute. So we can't afford a lake house in Central Texas. So our strategy really involves my parents that own house, out or at a resort community. You know, so we bought the adjacent lot. And what we're going to do is partner with my parents to build on that lot of cabana and pool that will then sort of transform what is a very, very lovely kind of retirement home for them into kind of a lake house style thing that the kids, you know, would really want to come back to, and that we can afford to help my partnering with my sister and my dad, and everybody's kind of a full family project to kind of create, you know, a theory, a place where we can compound.
Yep, the family compound. But
that's the kind of thing that we and so, you know, I hope it happens, we're just starting now and doing the planning for it. But, you know, sometimes you got to get creative in trying to create that, you know, that place that's going to bring everybody back together. In these times where things are just creating a place like that. It's just so difficult from a financial point of view, right now you got to get creative.
So we are my kids are playing games online. And I think we've talked about in the past that I sort of miss miss some of the cues because they're they're playing games with their friends. They're playing those cooperative games they're using using different text messaging, and you know, actually voice messaging things through through internet things, to talk with their friends about that. And they're playing these games, but I was thinking what, I really wish I could get in on that. But I'm not going to be playing the same video games, I'm not going to get on Minecraft the way that they they would. They're not gonna play Minecraft, if I'm playing Minecraft with them, right there, you know, whatever, all these other things. And so I've been thinking about what what games work well, for cooperative sort of games that you can you can do with your kids.
I certainly can't really answer that I'm kind of in the same boat. When Minecraft first kind of hit our house. We did a lot of playing that together. When he started playing online. It was still fairly new. And there was still a lot of bullying and stuff going online. Like your character shows up and suddenly gets killed every time and that was very frustrating for him. So we kind of stopped letting him play online. And he got a little older and got a little more into it and lots of talks about how that's just kind of BS. There's people out there who are going to do that. And I mean, we still played every once in a while, but it's one of those things that some of the games they play. I mean, I I hear my dad, or I know that how my dad felt about what the hell is going on with this video game. What are you doing? You're doing what? slime rancher? What? Okay, so you're corralling slime creatures, okay, sure. And I try to at least appear interested in and engage with him when he's telling me things. Oh, yeah, I got this new character. I bought this new slime or weapon or whatever. And I try to engage with him that way. But as far as cooperative play and playing video games with him, it's really only the battle games. There's a Mario crazy battle game where you're battling each other. And before they lost it. We played that a lot together as a family like everybody would play. And we have some older games. I have some Mortal Kombat stuff and which is still too crazy gory for the six year old. But I'm hoping I can get the boy to play some of those vintage games with me a little bit. Once we get that area completely set up and get the ps4 back from being repaired. All that kind of stuff. Penny really likes this game. She'll play anything. So she'll play anything with me. She'll beg me to play games. I think it's Shrek, two on the PS to love the play that. And there's some Sly Cooper. He's a thief, raccoon. And there is cooperative and battle games where you're the cop and, or the robber, and you're chasing each other around doing tasks and things. She loves playing those games with us. Like, okay, we'll play for an hour. And then two hours later, three hours later, we'll be sitting there still playing, and you just got to find what they like, little kids are little easier, because they're just excited to play video games. So they'll play whatever the older kids like, what they like, diving into that world is, is dangerous on so many levels. Because either, if you like it, you run the risk of making them hate it. So, at least in my experience, I don't I mean, I just, I loved video games as a kid. I just don't spend the time on it anymore. I still, I still like to play them. But every time I play them, I almost feel like, particularly if I played them for me if I play them, because I want to play a game. I feel like I'm wasting that time, which is where I feel like my parents.
Because there's so many other things I know I should be doing or could be doing. That would be so much more productive. But everything well, but you rephrase it right. you rephrase it in your head, but that you're not what you're doing is you're building a relationship with the kid. Right? Right, you know, oh, no. Yeah, I do. When I do. It's hard to get over that. When I do play for three hours with Penny. And then later on that night, I'm like, man, I didn't do anything. And Alice will say, Yes, you did. You played with your daughter for three hours. I'm like, Yeah, I did. So that's cool. Yeah. And so yeah, when I'm playing with them, but if I played by myself if I play a video game for me, that who I want to play the new Tony Hawk reissue games. I feel I mean, like, man, I played enough video games as a kid. He used to have crazy in high school or no, I was in college. We would have the playdates overnights, whatever sleep overs, everybody got wasted. And everybody played Mortal Kombat tournaments. All night long. And it was a blast. We had an absolute blast. So I've done enough of that. But yeah, when when Penny wants to play the silly little games that I can play. That's the other thing too. All the first person games, including Minecraft. They're hard for me to play. I can't. I just I can't play them. Well, I'm a button masher. And that stuff it. It just It's like watching a movie or they won't hold the camera. Fucking still. It makes me sick. It just gives me a headache. And it's just like, Yeah, all the cameras can't handle it.
Yeah. Well, I remember back when Farmville first came out, I started doing Farmville and I had this this thing in my head that I'm gonna build this farm. And I'm gonna pass it on to my kids. I don't know why. There was something about Farmville generational
video.
Like I would be able to build this up, and I transfer the ownership to my kids when how diluted was I that was,
I'm glad, though, it's a beautiful dream. It is. In in our household for me, there was a miss the truth for a number of dads. Like there was a there was a small window of when the kids had gotten old enough that there was no more nighttime crises. And they were really disciplined about we got everybody to bed at 830. And suddenly, in my life, there was this period from like, 830 until 1130, when really the house was totally quiet. I didn't have work responsibilities. It was like, Wow, I've got three hours myself, where I started gaining a little bit more again, I think, you know, between the time when, you know, the kids are like, you know, six did like nine or 10. You know, there was just a couple years there where I really and I started gaining a little bit it was mostly first person shooters and stuff like that, you know, just stuff that like pass a time because it was before the golden age of television when there's a billion shows for you to watch. And right. I took it up a little bit, but I'm terrible. Like, I have to put it on the dumbest level and I've got to you know, I've got to let the game basically win for me. I have no finger skills. I can't do any of that. So I can't really play with the kids. Like my skill level is so poor on the on the controller that I just I'm not on the same level they are but my kids get have been uninterested in games, there are sports kids and their outdoor kids. And they, you know, just wasn't really kind of thing, you know, occasionally. But video games for my youngest were a lifeline during the pandemic, that really suddenly all the things that gave him connection to his friends. And we're his defining things, which is, you know, mostly on the sports field, all gone. And he's stuck in the house. And, you know, some of these first interactive, that this is how for months, he actually got to interact with his friends, you know, and so they're just all in that game together. And they're all in a team, and they're all doing a first party shooter. And I was like, okay, all rolls off, forget it. This is serving a really important core purpose in his life, which is the it is the only communication that he's got with his friends is through this gaming platform. And so I never said a frickin word. I didn't care when I found him playing didn't care, you know, you know what the hours were. I didn't care. I didn't say thing. Because I could I could see their his friends. He's got the phone right here. He's got his head. He's in dialogue. Yeah. And to preserve that for teenagers is just was so valuable, that Thank you, violent video game for helping preserve my teenage son's fragile social web, during, you know, a time where he was feeling so isolated. So you know, I'm grateful for all the disgusting like, pink mist, like brain, whatever stuff that I would see on the screen. And he did that for months. And then this hilarious thing happened. The 17 year old tough lacrosse playing boys, he started playing Minecraft together. Walk in, and instead of, you know, this incredibly realistic file with you know, parachuting machine guns, whatever game that they're playing, suddenly, there's this like, pixelated like sword in his head, and he's going through the landscape. And I'm like, What is? What are you doing? They had, like, they've gone back to Minecraft. And then again, it was the same as all this group of boys. He's like, 17 year old kind of alpha boys. And since then, he's kind of moved on to like, in his as, as things have unlocked and emerged in other parts of his, his kind of social life is, has come back. He's, he's gaining less and less, and now he's doing more things like that. And then, and that's kind of his thing right now. But I will be forever grateful for violent video games, and how they help preserve my son's fragile social network during the earliest and most terrifying phases of the pandemic.
Yeah, well, you know, the the games that I was thinking of, for our family week. I rediscovered you don't know jack. I don't know if you remember, anybody that's younger than us probably doesn't remember that. There was a CD ROM game back in the in the 90s. That would insult you while you played it. But you'd get three friends to sit around a keyboard and each use a different key as a buzzer and, you know, do this trivia game and, and jack would come and yell at you and call you names. Well, that that company's still around. And they've they've got some newer versions of you don't know jack. But they they have these games. It's companies now. jackbox. And they've got this whole series of games and in party packs. And party packs are about 25 to $30. And it gives you you know, forever You can you can play those games. And they're they're party games. So So the idea is that you have it broadcasts
on a television and then your game controllers are all phones. Have you guys played any of these? We've done a few with friends up in Indianapolis and someone comes in from California. We've got like three from Indianapolis one from near Chicago. So yeah, we've we've played a couple of when you said jackbox I'm like okay, that's I know what that is. Yeah. They've got all these different trivia games and things like where you come up with the answers like then whoever gets the best, most votes for being the funniest and things. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's really well done, and it's easy to do over zoom.
Yeah, and it was originally wasn't intended to be done over zoom. It was not really meant to be a party game. That everybody would have their own phone. And so you'd sit in the living room and you do this and play. The the party packs are interesting too, because they'll, they'll have a variety of games. And there's usually a drying game like Pictionary. There's usually a vocabulary game, like, I guess, like an apples to apples sort of game, there's usually a, like a trivia game. And there's usually some sort of like, personality sort of game. So and I think they're up to seven of these packs. And, and just some of the games that one of the ones I like playing with my co workers, when when we were getting together every week, early in the pandemic, we would get together and we'd run out of things to talk about. So I had this pack, and we'd be on zoom would be like, 1215 people, because I work in a museum. Of course, everybody likes trivia. And so we play this game called trivia murder party. And you're, you have to answer these trivia questions. And I think we could play with like, up to eight people playing so everybody else can watch. And and I love that game. And there are a lot of games that forget getting to know you, but they're done in such a way that, that you're answering questions about yourself and your friends. And, and get to make jokes about each other. And you can make it as clean or as dirty as you want. So it works really well for kids, and family stuff. And clay. If you haven't done any of these yet, I think your kids would love it. It'd be a great a great thing for everybody to get together because it works. So well on zoom or on any of those plots. Yeah,
I would recommend the jackbox games, I have heard that there is a family version of Cards Against Humanity. And I think it's something is it kids against maturity, I think is what it's called. And it has a lot of poop jokes and things. So it takes out the sex stuff, and all of that, that, you know, and all the horrible things that are in Cards Against Humanity, and makes it much more family friendly. And I need to look into that one Cards Against Humanity is one of those. It's don't play that you play that with friends. And really good friend.
What you know, the family friendly version of that is apples to apples.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally.
But but so the one that you're talking about, and we'll find it and put a link in but so that when his still has dirty jokes, they're just kid dirty jokes.
Yeah. From what from what I understand. There's a lot of a lot of bathroom humor. So that's not so bad. Yeah.
So the other thing, you know, I mentioned my 13 year old 12 year old seem to be 13. We weren't planning on doing a birthday party because he does birthday parties in time of COVID. But my wife decided to change your mind on that. And we're trying to coordinate a birthday party for just three kids to join. But she's got this idea we're going to rent. there's a there's a game place. We talked about gaming conventions before. There's a game shop that does d&d, they do magic games, that sort of thing. They have rooms that are decorated in different themes. And they have gems game masters, that will run a d&d campaign, a one shot campaign with all the miniature figures, and all this stuff and have snacks for the kids. And so we're looking at doing that. But I was thinking about birthday parties and what people do for birthday parties these days. Because it seems like it's all over the map. There's still the Chucky cheese thing. People still do well. Pre COVID. Anyway, yeah, people were doing doing Chucky cheese. I don't think that was ever sanitary. But no, I think we did. There was a trampoline trampoline birthday party a few weeks ago that one of the kids went to, well,
we've we've done a pretty big range of things. We've just rented a room at a pizza joint and had the kids come and we and we made the games for them. Basically beer pong, but he got prizes for kidding. Rather than drinking beer, things like that. We've had parties here at the house where we did the same kind of thing, where they were chucking pokey ball cards down the down the stairs, trying to hit them into a box. We've done bouncing ping pong balls down the stairs, when just now So yeah, I mean, so we haven't done really done a pool party at all. Really? We've
had a couple of kids over but we've never really had the birthdays in January. So that's obvious. Yeah.
Yeah, and Penny's isn't February. We tried to rent a gymnastic place one year. I think it was his sixth birthday. Like I remember that one. Yeah. And they mumble rap and like I didn't have us reserved, though we had already paid for it or whatever. I mean, and so we're showing up at the joint and nobody's there, and I'm just I'm freaking out that, you know, the kids gonna just lose it. And it was luckily a warm day in January. So we just packed up our cake and everything. And we took it down the road to a little park. And we did everything at the park. And we had a great little time, and he just rolled with it. And we were so worried because he was kind of sensitive at that age, but he just rolled with it so well. And they refunded us, of course, and gave us that amount again, in gift cards, to apologize and everything. And so we use that to go buy a shit ton more toys and stuff for him. Because this was before the girl came along. So we've done that route. I just kind of go with what they want. I remember a long time ago, Dad Labs, that I think it was clay and I think Troy to your goal was more to do not necessarily a party, but an activity and experience, if you will, rather than just doing parties. I don't know how you can tell us how well that worked out for you. I love that idea. My idea was going you know what, every year I'm taking him skiing. You know, we live in Kentucky, there's not a lot of skiing go to Paoli peaks, it's fairly close. It's in January, they'll have snow. That was my goal. Never has happened. We've never gone snowboarding or skiing. It all has been pretty much parties and they've been very small. I went to Chucky cheese twice as a kid begged my parents to go. And I totally I've been there twice as an adult with children. I understand why my parents said no. I totally get it. I have no desire to take my kids there ever again and they can beg me all they want. We'll go do something else. Something more fun than Chucky cheese. I've taken the kids to the trampoline park. The last time we went. The girl just wanted to play the video games there. I'm like we play video games all day at home. We're here to jump on the trampoline. I'm not giving you any quarters or anything. You can go sit there and watch them and watch the little, you know, intros and things on all the different games. We're not playing video games here. We spent $30 for you to jump on trampolines. Get your ass on the trampoline. I would have loved to trampoline birthday party as a kid.
Too many friends of mine have taken their kids for birthday parties to those trampoline parks and have had to go to the emergency room.
Oh, yes. They could see me ending up in the emergency room. And he's
blown out hips blown out. I mean, just nasty stuff. Arms, you know, they they catch themselves. So I've learned you know, luckily from somebody else that don't even try.
I got a 50 birthday party coming up. Not this year, but next year. Yeah. Alice turns 50 this year. So I got a nose.
I don't think we can keep that a secret from her.
It's not from her just that I said it out loud. Oh, in a public forum. Yeah. None both of you listeners Don't tell her. I said anything.
We're up to three and a half.
All right. Well, I'll tell you guys don't say anything. So I got to figure out something for that. For Kids. Just figure out what they're into and say, Hey, what do you want to do? You can tell them? We're not doing a you know, big, gigantic crazy party. Tell them you can invite five friends. And we'll do whatever. You know, something like, the smaller the party is the more elaborate and crazy stuff you can do. We've done a couple of movie nights out back not as a party, but just movie night out back. Yeah.
So what do high school kids want for their birthday stuff?
Oh, boy. I do have I've got so many. Perfect. I mean, really, now it's about let's go. You know, let's go Where do you want to go to dinner or something like that? Right? Yeah. And those are really special. And I love those kind of birthday certifications because I was not good at the birthday party thing. You know, we were not into, you know, huge birthday celebration we did kind of homey things very small mostly was just an excuse for us to get together our friends and drink wine. When the kids were little. And we got away with that with kind of our oldest and with our middle. You know, I kind of convinced her because she had a fall birthday. I convinced her that really she didn't want to have a party. what she wanted to do was go with me to the University of Texas football home games. That was way better than birthday party and she was kind of gullible so that we won soccer and then we You know, I kept trying that with my youngest. I was like, Hey, you know, you don't really want to hang birthday party. And he was like bullshit. Yeah, I want a big ass birthday party, like all my friends have like, What are you talking about? Oh, man. And so finally, like somebody called us on our bullshit, and we were like, Okay, we got to have a, we got a birthday party for this kid. I think it was about his eighth birthday party. We're like, Okay, fine. We'll finally do one of these big ass birthday parties. And we rented like this big, like, waterslide thing, that they just come and they set it up in your yard. And it's an inflatable and it's got hooked up to a million hoses and the kids run and they slide on it. There's a big pool at the end of it. And it's super, super fun. Which was great. Until like three days before his birthday party, my son went out and broke his fucking arm. Oh, and so he shows up for bicycle, right? And his breaks his arm is horrible. We have to go to the hospital. He's in a j cast. And his birthday is like, afraid of water slide. That's it. That's the whole thing for his birthday. So he's gonna sit there and watch and watch all his friends run on the waterslide in his cast. And that was a point at which real like, Kim and I were like, screw it. Tap the college fund. We got to make something happened. We had a petting zoo. There was a clown. There was a magic show. And it was it was like, I mean, we spend more on that birthday party that we spent on our wedding. I'm not kidding you. baby goats running all over the face and chickens and clowns pulling out of their butt and like people, you know, magicians and magic tricks. I mean, it was it was absolutely the most elaborate party. Like what? This is psychotic. Like, there's just too everyone's overwhelmed. Like there's too much going on. Just as usual, operating. But you know, basically by the nuclear power of our own guilt, you're trying to make something magical. It is powerful
stuff. And and all the other parents are just hating you. Because you just raised the bar of insanity.
Well, I mean, we have
a petting zoo, daddy. Cooper was here the
whole time with his broken arm. Yeah, still hating it like this is like it was just the most disjointed, crazy birthday party ever. So don't ever do that.
Well, my younger son has birthdays about a week before Christmas. The other son has birthdays at the end of April. These are the worst times to have a birthday for kids. Because Christmas time everybody's gone. You know, everybody scheduled for stuff. So you try to schedule something with family. It's normally in Christmas break. And so, you know, families are off. You know, if we try to do something on the weekend, nobody comes up. We tried to have a birthday for him once at at the comments in Columbus. And nobody showed up. We didn't get any rsvps. But here we brought in a cake. You know, we're just hoping that somebody just said, you know, we'll be there anyway. But you know, screw them. We're not going to tell him. Nobody shows up. But we've got a cake. We tried to do this. Nobody. And it was it was brutal. Same thing would happen with with the older son in in April. Because we're at the end of the school year, everybody's got stuff going on, you know, their graduation parties that start, you know, for college and whatever everybody's, you know, going out. So we started this thing. Conveniently, though, that week before Christmas is when the Star Wars movies were coming out. Right? And then right before, right, right at the end of April was when the Marvel movies were coming out. And so each year, we had a Star Wars movie and a Marvel movie to depend on there for about five years. And so we were able to get you know, if you if you try to shoot for like 15 kids, you'll get none. But we discovered was if we plan this out a month ahead of time, we can start on that list, and we can specifically give an invitation to a kid at school so that he's excited about it. And he takes it home and says Mom I'm gonna go get to see you know, whatever the the Marvel movie was. So now the parents, okay, so so it's just him, and we're going to drop him off at the movie theater. And they're going to take him and they're going to do this. Because it's one kid in our family. That means, you know, no holds barred. So anything they want from the stand, you know, if we were just taking kids to the movie, they, they get like a drink and a popcorn, that'd be it. But anything they want, they can get the nachos and get the they can get a beer if they want. But we're gonna take them that movie, then we're gonna go wherever, whatever restaurant they want to do. And so that's what we do. And that has worked for us. Since then, up until, of course, last year, when you know, all hell broke loose. And so we we didn't do anything big with us. But But, you know, everything's off the rails. So, so no big deal. But now we're going to do this. We're going to try to do this role playing game, birthday party. I'll tell you, we're, it's gonna be insane. I think just trying to get all this put together.
I'm interested to hear how that goes. Because we've been to one where they had something kind of like Minecraft, there was some kind of weird game. But the room was set up. And there were like, 40 inch TVs in the entire room. It was a circle, and the gaming console, whatever control panel was in the middle, and then it was that a guy stood and did everything with and set everything up. And then all around that was seating with the game controllers. Hmm. So everybody was playing in the same world, but had their own TV and we're running around with each other. That wasn't our party. He went to a party with Yeah. And it was only like, five or six kids, it wasn't a really big thing. And you pay for it by the room or something like that. I don't know.
Well, I'm sure it's not unique here. But there are a few companies in our area in the downriver area of Detroit, that have like a an RV trailer, like a fifth wheel trailer. And it's set up with video games. And so they roll up to your house. Yeah. And then they've got like eight consoles for the kids to play games on, it's got all the networking in there. So you don't have to set it up. You don't have to own anything. And they run that this, this place is really just they wanted to have a role playing club. And so they've rented I don't know if it's a house, or if it's a strip mall place or whatever. But they have all these little rooms where they can play magic or role playing games. And I think the idea was that they would get club members, and then you could use that for your own private games. And then of course, they'd sell snacks and stuff out in front are something these hobbyists they like to paint their miniatures for Warhammer and whatever else. And so they've got all these really intricate things. But when you're when you're 35, and you've spent the last 15 years of your life spending every penny you've got not on your rent, not on you know, a significant other, but on all these little pewter statues. And you look at it and go, I don't have any place to put these. And so you come up with this business idea that you're going to rent them out. And that's how I think that's what they're doing. I think I think they've got this Fantasyland to build up. And and they're trying to put it to good use. And God bless him for it. Because that means that
that's what their passion was d&d never went away. And that's right.
I think this will be a lot of fun. So so hopefully we can get it we can get it all put together.
But I'm I'm curious as to how that will go more about the time wise, because anything I've ever played d&d was never a one session thing. There might be one objective we'd complete in in an evening by luck. But almost everything I ever played went on for weeks. Well,
so the pictures so you know, I've got pictures of these rooms. And so I've got a table with the dungeon. So you can see the whole dungeon and there's a dragon in one spot. So you're, you've got a very limited dungeon.
Yeah. And so they've got it's just weird to me, because it's like, yeah,
so this will be very, very similar to convention gaming. When you go to a game convention and you play, you're doing a one shot. Nobody's expecting to come back to it the next time. So I mean, and I think it'll be great because, you know, it'll be run by an adult that knows what they're doing. And so far they've they've played with kid run games when they're doing d&d. And so it's it's been really not very custom. Right. It's been it's been out of a book. And so this should give them some exposure to a little bit different perspective. I think so. So we'll see. Oh, see. What's great talking to you guys again tonight. Sorry. I
was like, one of those days always.
No, I mean, not you're always late. It's always
I know what you meant. Yeah. I was like, Oh shit, I gotta go I I couldn't get bail. Cuz like I get to talk to adults I need to talk to adults who aren't like trying to you know, who aren't kicking my ass with my shoulder and stuff. That's the only other
adults I get to find you making progress there. That's great.
Thanks to Nick Dawson and Clay Nichols and their awesome families for sharing them with us. Ask Dad Labs is produced and edited by me Ben Folds and fote Media productions LLC. Like follow subscribe and share across the social media landscape wherever you find DadLabs Talk to you next time.
