“Hey, he’ll blame us next.”
We stopped to buy coffee at a restaurant on a road trip, and my son and I went to the toilet.
As we stood next to each other at the urinals, my 11-year-old son looked over at me suddenly and said, “Oh, god! There’s a spider climbing up my leg.” [continue reading…]
“Look, I’m floating.”
My youngest daughter and I were swimming in the ocean and she said, “Watch this.”
She submerged herself belly up under the water, put her right hand on her nose and then lay as still as possible. After a few seconds she came up for a breath.
“You see, I can float now,” the eight-year-old said.
I instructed her that you’re meant to float on top of the water, not underneath.
She looked at me puzzled and said, “Really?”
“Yeah, give me a second, will you?”
For my youngest daughter, a pinky promise is the greatest of all vows. She lives by them.
So when she held out her pinky to me at the end of last summer, I should have known that she would finally let me teach her how to surf like her older brother and sister.
This would, of course, complete my dream of becoming a family of surfers who together would travel the world in search of good waves. And, maybe, the three of them would go on to compete professionally or become paid soul surfers like I had wanted to do as a kid. [continue reading…]