Posts Tagged ‘dads’

This past weekend we ended a week-long celebration of Bean’s birthday at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.  Now, the animal kingdom isn’t really my cup of tea.  I’m more along the lines of the thrill seeker type.  Actually ANY other park would have suited me better.  Magic Kingdom has a few pretty good rides, Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM) has a great roller coaster and the Tower of Terror, you can drink around the world at Epcot, Seaworld has two great roller coasters and they give you two free beers, and Universal Studios has the best rides around.  For the men out there, these are the parks that you want to focus on when visiting.

The problem for me is that Katie hates thrill rides.  She gets nervous watching them fly down a 100′ drop and turn into a barrel roll and twist and turn as fast as they can.  So…  because of that and because the little man is a little too little to get on those rides we ended up going to the Animal Kingdom.  However we had a great time and they have one coaster, so I was happy.  Mount Everest is nothing crazy, but you sit in a train car and zip around a few corners.  The ride got pretty exciting when half-way through it came to a stop and went backwards down a different track in the dark.  That part was great.  They also have one of the typical water rides in a big round raft that 8 other people sit in.  It’s not the best one I’ve ever seen, but its great for a hot afternoon in Orlando.

What I loved most about the park was their attention to detail.  Of course all of the parks have details so amazing that you sometimes can’t tell if its real or fake, and I love seeing all of that stuff.  Given my background in scenery, I always appreciate the work that goes into it all.  This was my favorite:

They paved the road on the safari to look like mud with tire tracks.  Yes…  That is a paved road with fake tracks… That is freaking brilliant.  And it looked amazing.

Bean Man was a trooper that day.  I mean, I was dead at the end of the day but that little guy just kept on crusin!  He loved every minute of it.  I have to admit, at first I was against the whole let’s spend $80 a person to go to the park for a day for Bean’s first birthday.  To me it was going to be a total waste of money we don’t really have right now.  He was only turning one, which means he wasn’t going to remember the day, so why waste the money??  But I will tell you, and just keep this between you and me, Kate was absolutely right on this one.  After seeing his eyes light up at the shows and the characters, it was 1000% worth every penny.  Bean Man won’t tell you, but I can tell you that it was probably the best day of his little life.  He had so much fun!

I learned a valuable lesson in parenting this past weekend.  When kids are little, even though they don’t know any better, it is still SO important to value those times together and make those days just as important as if they were 5 or 10 or 15.  Sure they aren’t going to remember the day years later, but that’s why you take pictures and videos.  Your kids deserve the best that you can give them whether that’s a blow up swimming pool in the backyard or a day at the parks.  As long as your spending time with them and celebrating their big day, they will think its the best thing ever.

As you all know, we here at MC are picking up and heading south. Its crazy how all of this happened and I’m still not sure how it seemed to all work out. It wasn’t easy getting this far, and its not over yet so we will keep you posted of course. But making this decision was really hard for me in particular. It took me a LONG time to get comfortable with the idea of going back to Florida, mainly because I love it here and I love our life here.

I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’m an independent person, I always have been. I talk to my family once a week or so, sometimes more and sometimes less, but we are all ok with that schedule. Its been like that ever since I went to college. So it didn’t bother me when we made the decision to move to Connecticut to live. Sometimes I hate that I can’t see my sister for lunch and things like that but I have learned to live with it. I know that they will always be there for me if I need them. Maybe that is a little selfish on my part, but I love that me and Kate have our own lives up here. And it makes it so much more fun when family does come to visit because we could show them places that they had never seen before!

I won’t lie. I have fallen in love with New England. As a kid I was always jealous that we didn’t have snow. It flurried like twice when we were growing up and I can remember being so excited I couldn’t even sleep. CT is a beautiful place to live. There is so much history and culture and not to mention the scenic drives are endless. I love love love love love seeing the seasons pass. I’m of the out-doorsy type and I used to think the Utah was the most beautiful place I had ever seen but I think CT takes the cake. Each season has a completely different mood and feeling and I’m going to miss that so much. In Orlando, everyday looks the same. Sunny, usually warm, it will shower around 3pm, and the trees never loose their leaves. Poor trees.

But possibly the biggest hesitation I have for packing up and moving out are all of my brothers in NYC. I can’t tell you what it means to have people around that you have known for 15+ years. Justin, my best friend since the sixth grade, grew up down the street from me when we were kids. We have been friends for so long that I can remember having sleep-over’s and talking about kissing a girl for the first time. And I can remember the first time we tried a beer. And building tree-forts. Hell I new him YEARS before I met Kate (side note, I think they actually had a thing before we got together. weird.) Now I see him playing with my son and it blows my mind.

My other boys, that justin and I met in high school, all live in the city as well and let me tell you having that support group a train ride away has been awesome. I love all of those guys and I’m going to miss them more than anything.

Now I had a feeling that we wouldn’t be around all of these wonderful things forever. I figured when we had kids that we would end up in the Carolina area which both of us had the desire to live at some point. I certainly never thought we would go all the way back to Florida, and I really didn’t think we would be heading there like tomorrow.

But the reason I can to terms with all of this is this little guy.

You see, on the flip side of all of this, I have this Bean that need to think about now. I keep going back to the fact that I don’t know where I would be if my grandparents didn’t live next door to me growing up. I was my granddad’s little shadow as soon as i could walk and I know that I want BeanMan to have a relationship like that with his grandparents. We can’t do that from Connecticut, it just doesn’t work. But I guess that’s what you do when you have kids. You still make your life decisions, you just make those decisions with someone else in mind.

I love our life here. The past five or years has been some of the best years of my life. Our marriage is stronger than ever and we have a little family of our own now, so I feel like this chapter is complete. We are at a fork and we have chosen the path to Florida. The important thing is that we made the decision together. Kate started the conversation, and we talked, and we argued, and we talked, and we made the decision that we felt was the best one for everyone evolved; Me, Kate, Bean, the Dogs, and our families. My friends will always be my brothers, and Connecticut will always have its scenic drives, but Bean Man will only grow up once. And I really want him to grow up with his family close by.

On Father’s Day, our local newspaper, the New Haven Register, ran an article on Man Caves.  They chose three area dads to profile who each have their own manly domains in their houses and Chris’ Man Cave was one of them.  Last week one of the paper’s writer’s, Jim Shelton (Hi, Jim!), came out to our house to interview both Chris and me and to take pictures of Chris in his Man Cave.  It was actually a lot of fun, despite my previous rantings of injustice.

Check out the full article at the New Haven Register’s website:

http://nhregister.com/articles/2009/06/21/life/doc4a3c25d54eeb3743332699.txt