1.5-2.5, 3-5

Sundays are when all the dads come out, and when I was chatting with another dad at the playground, he told me that the age our kids are at now was the hardest, the span between about 1.5 to 2.5 years. “That’s how old they are, right?” His were now 3 and 5. Many reasons, but it was their propensity to hurt themselves if you weren’t watching.

There was a time, he told me, that he suddenly he realized he was having fun with his kid at a restaurant. “Just… having fun.” He struggled a little bit with how to say it, how to capture the surprise of that moment. But I got what he meant, immediately. It can be interesting and rewarding, but also hard work that you need to recover from afterward because you can’t relax for a second. In that sense, it is not “fun” at all, not in the way we normally mean the word.

I asked him what age that happened at, how old they were when it became fun, but before he could answer, Nicanor got clocked by a swing, and I had to comfort him, and the moment moved on, and I never got an answer.