FIELD TRIP DAD

One of my favorite and most privileged roles in life is that of Dad, and in our house, along with it comes the role of "field trip Dad".  As a result, over the last 6 years of having several of my kids in elementary school, I've been to over 20 field trips in San Diego.  I've seen the same aquarium, the zoo, the park, sea world, and mission trails multiple times.  I've sat on yellow buses enough that I have the pre-trip speech memorized and I even know to be quiet when the teacher raises their hand and starts the finger count down.  I can pack a mean brown bag lunch with only stuff you throw away when you're done and have used my God-given whistle to grab the attention of the crew for the teacher on many an occasion.

About 75% of the time, it's me and a bunch of moms, so I usually just stick with my kid and whatever group of their friends I'm responsible for to avoid the latest mom gossip.  My joke with my wife is that I'm trying to avoid the dreaded "mom thong" sighting that happens far too often when at the tide pools or any other field trip that has mom's bending over to show a kid an animal and the rest of us her choice of undees.  I'm just sayin'.... way too much info ladies.

Anyway,  last week was the last field trip of Tyler's elementary school career.  I wrote about it here in a guest post on my friend Doug Field's blog.  The "cliche" phrase that "time does fly" might be the most truthful cliche in the world.  Dang it. I get tears in my eyes just thinking about all the stages we've passed and how few seem to really still be ahead of me.  I love my kids but their fast becoming young men and women.... too fast really.

Somehow, each time I went, I started snapping a "my kid and I" pic. I surfed through my photo pile and found a grip of them. I created an album in facebook of them for friends here.

In case you can't view those and in honor of my kids and Dad's day weekend, I grabbed the last 4 and put them here.  Thanks for making my life richer than it should be TJ, Tyler, Jake, Becky and Billy.  You each are a treasure.