Everyone Everywhere All at Once

Newsletter 2025-12-07

Do you know where your children are? I don’t. Not even Google Maps can find them.

The scattering started early this weekend. My fifteen-year-old, Betsy, originally planned to volunteer Saturday. Then she got a better offer. At the last minute, her friend announced she was having her sixteenth birthday party at Great Wolf Lodge in Cincinnati. Betsy asked if she could go. I took our family there last February and came away with the impression that it would be our last trip to an indoor water park. All of the children seemed bored and underwhelmed. Their favorite part was simply staying in the hotel room. We could have done that at a cheaper hotel closer to home. Wait until I introduce them to the wonderful world of Motel 6. Yet when Betsy’s friend invited her, she was filled with excitement. Everything is better with people your own age. Actually, it’s better with literally anyone other than your parents. I went through a similar experience with Betsy at amusement parks. When she was with me, I couldn’t convince her to go on anything bigger than a midsize coaster. But when she was with her friends, she was suddenly fearless and rode every steel behemoth in sight. Peer pressure can inspire you to great feats of bravery. If Betsy’s friends all jumped off a bridge, she would, too, but only if it was bungee jumping and she first declined to go with me.

The first kid was scheduled to be out of the house. The next to book her exit was my eleven-year-old, Lucy. She got an invite to a birthday party sleepover at a friend’s house in the next suburb. The invitation was muddled from the start. Eleven-year-olds are sometimes unreliable narrators. After several minutes of a confusing text conversation between Lucy and the birthday girl, my wife Lola and I came away with the impression that this was a coed sleepover. That was a deal-breaker. I’m not the most overprotective of parents, but even I have my red lines. All of those lines concern boys, which are by far the worst gender. I had Lucy get the phone number for the birthday girl’s dad. I called him. My fears were unfounded. This was a completely standard all-girls sleepover. The main point of confusion was that I don’t know what names are boy names and girl names anymore. I told Lucy she could go. In fact, we would already be in the area Saturday at the appointed drop-off time. Ditching my children would never be easier.

All of that scheming took place up through Friday night. Saturday morning, it was time to implement the plan. I started out the day by abandoning my family myself. Well, only my immediate family. I needed to drive across the city to help my father-in-law, Bob. It felt like the world had been turned upside down. I’m the one who usually calls him to rescue me from some home improvement project that has gotten out of hand or, more likely, hasn’t been started at all. This time, Bob needed me for manual labor. His double oven died. Bob being Bob, he looked up a fix on YouTube. He removed the circuit board, sent it away to be repaired, and reinstalled it himself. That failed to resolve the problem. Demoralized at failing to repair something for the first time ever, he reached out for help to move the double oven. The delivery people for the new oven would install it, but they wouldn’t pull the old one out because it was built into the cabinetry. Naturally, when he needed to move something heavy, he called the strongest man he knew: my brother-in-law, Jerry. Jerry subcontracted out to me.

I thought this would be a quick and easy job. Jerry warned me otherwise. He said he had helped Bob pull the oven a little way out a few weeks before so that Bob could reinstall the circuit board. The oven weighed approximately as much as the moon. I didn’t take that threat seriously, mostly because I’m bad at math. When I hear a big number, my brain sidesteps and thinks about tacos. When I got to Bob’s house Saturday, I realized that Jerry’s estimate had been accurate. My main miscalculation was assuming that a double oven meant two separate units, with one stacked on top of the other. In reality, it was a single giant appliance. Bob had removed the doors beforehand, which dropped the weight by roughly seventy pounds. It was still heavy. Worse, it was awkward, which is a polite way of saying I’m weak. Because of the way it was built into the cabinets, Jerry and I could only get one arm each inside the oven. With great effort, we pulled it out of its spot and set it on special wooden boxes Bob had built for that purpose. He couldn’t fix the stove, but he could build stove removal infrastructure. We all cope with failure in our own ways.

Photo by Lisa Anna on Unsplash

From there, Bob again made our lives easier with a hand cart and furniture moving blanket that helped the oven slide on the wood floor. In just a few minutes, we got the oven across the house and to the door leading to the garage. It was at that point that Bob’s fancy life hacks could no longer help us. The doorway was too narrow. Jerry and I would have to solve the problem by turning the oven sideways and lifting it through. After much build up, we carried the unit down three small steps and set it on the garage floor. I was needlessly proud of myself for a task that had in total, involved about two minutes of manual labor. When I got back in my van, I realized I was bleeding. I had cut my delicate finger on one of the sharp metal edges the manufacturer had helpfully included on the oven. I’m not tough enough to be in the appliance moving game. I’ll leave it to younger, fitter men. Better yet, I’ll send Bob more fix-it YouTube videos to make sure none of his other fixtures break.

From there, I headed home. When I was still a few minutes away, Lola called me. Lucy’s phone had stopped working at the worst possible time. We were supposed to send her away for her sleepover in just a few hours. I couldn’t abandon my child if I couldn’t use technology to parent her remotely. I do my best work as a dad from a distance. Lola thought it might be a payment issue. Our cell phone carrier sometimes arbitrarily stops billing our credit card and calls us dead beats. The solution is for me to go on their website and tell them to keep billing the credit card they already have on file. They’re the only company I’ve ever dealt with that is reluctant to take my money. As soon as I walked in the door, I hopped on the website for the carrier. Our bill was fully paid. That was bad news. The problem was something far worse.

I started an online chat with tech support. That’s how I spent the next two hours. I went through one full loop with the first rep before they dumped me on the second rep, who had me restart the exact same steps from the beginning. Finally, Lola came downstairs. We tried a simple experiment: We put Lola’s SIM card and Lucy’s phone and Lucy’s SIM card and Lola’s phone. The results immediately told us that Lucy’s SIM card had gone bad. I didn’t realize that could happen. In this house, electronics age like milk. Unfortunately, this company doesn’t offer eSIMs. We had to order a new physical SIM card, which wouldn’t arrive for days. After two hours of effort, I hadn’t actually solved the problem. Now I knew how Bob felt with that oven. I told Lucy that, when she got to her friend’s house, she would just have to hop on the Wi-Fi to communicate with us. That’s basically the same thing as being cut off from all technology. She might as well have been Amish.

Thanks to my failures as my family’s IT department, we were half an hour late to our next engagement. We were heading to Jerry’s house. He and his wife Alice live five minutes from the site for Lucy’s sleepover in the next suburb. That meant she had to spend a few hours with the boring adults before we dropped her off. Our plan was to watch Firefly with our board game friends, Peter and Delilah, who had never seen it. We originally tried to get the series in time to have a marathon with them on Thanksgiving, but it didn’t arrive on inter-library loan until this week. We were now in a time crunch to view it all before we had to return it. Our rush was unwarranted. Jerry revealed that he had the one and only season of it on a streaming service I lacked. In today’s economy, having extra subscriptions is the true mark of wealth. We watched two episodes before it was time for me to drop off Lucy and do a porch pickup for some children’s boots. I like to multitask my errands when ditching other social gatherings. I came back, finished one more episode of Firefly, and took Lola home. We still had two more children to get out of the house.

My ten-year-old, Waffle, was supposed to be in the Christmas parade that night on the Cub Scout float. We called her on our way home and told her to feed herself so she’d be ready to leave for the parade. She had enough time to eat about three bites before we picked her up. At the last second, my thirteen-year-old, Mae, decided she wanted to go, too. She’s aged out of Cub Scouts and is currently working her way through BSA. Many of the leaders are the same between the two groups. Mae said she wanted to walk beside the float and toss candy with the adults while Waffle rode. She was a fortuitous addition. By the time I was supposed to drop off Waffle at the park where the parade was marshaling, all the inbound roads were blocked. If only it were possible to deliver children by drone. I left Mae and Waffle across the street from the park and told them to walk. With all of my children dispersed, I headed home. I wouldn’t know what to do with all that silence.

It didn’t last. As soon as I got back, I began monitoring Google Maps to see when the children were in motion. This might come as news to you, but Christmas parades are cold. The starting point was a mile from our house, but the parade route was only a block away. I checked my phone to see Mae’s location. It was a good thing it had been Lucy’s SIM card and not hers that broke. Then I would have had no choice but to go outside and wait in the cold. With technology on my side, I vowed not to leave home until the last possible second. Mae’s location on the map bounced around. It was hard to tell if it was because the float was in motion or because her phone couldn’t decide which tower it wanted to connect with. After waiting half an hour, Mae’s signal finally appeared on the parade route. Lola and I bundled up and headed out. We quickly discovered Google had lied. It was another twenty minutes before we saw the first float. When Mae walked by, she threw a big handful of candy at me and told me to pick it up to take it home for her. That’s candy embezzlement. She learned from the best.

After the last float, I drove to the park to retrieve two kids. The other two wouldn’t be home until the next day. It was good to finally have everyone back. At least that’s what I would have said if everyone actually was back. Instead, Lola took off for California, but that’s a story for Friday.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James