I have attended countless guys weekends wether it be a golf trip, ice fishing, weekend, or the first weekend of March Madness in Vegas, Shirley has always been accommodating and watched the kids while I went off on my adventures and in some cases misadventures.  However, Shirley has actually gone on three trips in the past year and a half, three more than I have gone on in that time period.  For her fortieth birthday she went to New York with her sisters and cousins, in May she went out to California for her friend’s wedding, and this past weekend to Chicago to see Hamilton with some of her girlfriends.  I would imagine the conversation centered on who was going to make it to the Super Bowl as well as their mid season picks for the NCAA tournament.  I can’t get Shirley to stop talking Zion Williamson, at least when she’s not talking about what a brilliant offensive mind Sean McVay has.  Regardless, I have speculated on a number of occasions as to what women talk about when they are together and have come up with a potential list for topics that is in no particular order:

• how to avoid having sex with their husbands
• their kids
• how to avoid having sex with their husbands
• who has the longest active daily delivery streak from Amazon
• how to avoid having sex with their husbands
• their husbands
• yoga pants

I may be missing a few topics of conversation, but I think that nails most of what was discussed this past weekend by Shirley and her cohorts.  While Shirley was busy seeing the sights and sounds of Chicago and drinking wine I had Aiden and Parker to deal with.  The weekend started off on a bit of a rough note when I found out Shirley was leaving Friday night instead of Saturday morning to beat the winter storm that was approaching.  That was a great way for her to get dialed in for girl’s weekend and one of the most popular topics of conversation, had I know about her early departure I wouldn’t have went right to bed when I got home from Bowling league Thursday night.  The nice thing about my kids being 5 and 8 is that they love tv, their tablets, and the Nintendo switch, now I say that’s a nice thing because it allowed me to sleep in when they woke up at 7am on Saturday morning, it’s not a nice thing when it is all they want to do and every time I step away from them they are getting a hit of their tablet or the switch as if they were crack addicts looking for that next high.  I speculated to what girls talk about on a girls weekend but here is a list of the most popular questions my kids ask me:

• Dad can we watch your phone? (Atomic Puppet is their favorite show on Netflix and I put it on my blue tooth  when we are in the car, it’s actually a pretty funny cartoon)
• How old are you dad? (Ive been 44 since last February, yet they still ask me every other day how old I am, wondering if they took out a life insurance policy on me behind my back)
• Similar to the age question, When’s your birthday dad?
• Dad can we watch your phone?
• Can you wipe my butt?  (yes, this question is becoming less frequent, but they know when they have a disaster on their hands, and it’s better for all parties involved if I take charge of the situation)
• Saturday the most popular question was “when are we leaving for the waterpark?”

Yes, I had agreed to take them to the Double JJ waterpark (I kept wanting to call it the Double Va JJ water park) since Shirley was going to be gone for the weekend and she indicated that it would be best if I took them alone since she didn’t want to have to endure a day at Double Va JJ.  My Saturday started off with me heading to the closest Starbucks while leaving my kids at home to fend for themselves, I knew our dog Allie was not going to be of any assistance since she is the Boston Terrier version of Stevie Wonder without the musical talent, but Jasper would definitely keep them out of harms way so that he could eventually attack them while they are sleeping.  Last spring when Shirley was gone I went for a run while the kids watched Peter Rabbit, I felt that the myriad of electronics at their disposal when combined with the frigid temperatures would be enough to allow me to be gone for at least four hours (I was actually only gone for 45 minutes tops).

When I got home I decided to get a P90 work out in so that I could look my best for all the lovely ladies that would be at the water park, my kids came down every three minutes and asked me when we were leaving, I told them two hours but the reality is that I could have told them seventy two days and it would have had the same effect on them.  They still ask me on Monday if they have school the next day and on Tuesday if tomorrow is Friday.  I feel like when I was in second grade I had that shit down and knew how long an hour was, the days of the week, and how old my dad was.  I didn’t mind them coming down and bothering me because I was still able to continue with my workout but their incessant yapping was making it almost impossible to listen to the podcast I had on.

With my workout complete and the swim bag loaded up with towels (I had read a google review that said the double Va JJ towels were the size of a wash cloth and the texture of sandpaper) spare underwear, and swim goggles, we were on our way.  I had to make a stop at Costco and left the kids in my car to watch Atomic Puppet, I leave it running with the doors locked, I figure if someone wants my kids bad enough to break the window of my car and attempt to drive away with them while parked in the Costco parking lot, go for it.  (I am disclosing these parenting techniques so that other parents can be liberated and take advantage of them, or at the very least tell me what a great job of parenting I am doing).  The reason I leave my kids in the car is because they hate Costco, they use to want to go in the store so they could take advantage of the samples, but they have realized the samples suck and are not nearly enough incentive to turn their back on atomic puppet.

Parker brought a friend with him and when we got there the kids insisted on playing mini golf before going into the waterpark.  I went to get them putters and balls and the girl at the counter told me it was $7 a pop, for some reason I didn’t put my foot down, but I did save $7 by not playing myself and we were off to the indoor putt putt course.  The kids averaged roughly 33 strokes per hole, with the highlight being Paker winding up and hitting a line drive that narrowly missed his friend’s head as his friend tried to finish up hole 17.  I was impressed that he could get the ball up off the ground with that much momentum with only a putter but we are definitely going to have to work on his aim.

It was finally the moment I had dreaded, getting the kids organized and ready to go into the water park.  They must have circulated a groupon to all the local trailer parks based upon the customers attending that day, lots of tats and lots of exposed belly fat.  There were separate changing rooms for men, women, and families.  For some reason I had expected the family changing room to be similar to the Y where there are enclosed rooms for families to change in.  Not the case at all, there were stalls to change in, as well as stalls to go to the bathroom in.  I would hope no one is dropping a deuce in the family locker room while families sit helplessly by in their changing stalls, but something tells me it has happened a time or two.  “You kids stay here in this changing stall, Uncle Ron has to drop his own kids off at the pool before we go into  that dog gone water park.”

While I had hoped I could just keep our swim bag in an area with our towels and not have to use a locker, it was fairly obvious that leaving my swim bag with my phone and wallet in it would have been an even worse decision than taking a dump in the family locker room so I ponied up $6 for the extra large locker along with a $20 deposit (they really don’t want you running off with the key).  The kids had been talking about the four person water slide on the way up and I had not put much thought into how that impacted me.  Unfortunately, all of them were completely worthless when it came to helping me carry the four person tube up the six flights of stairs that led to the different water slides.  It was how I imagine business time with a large women would be, I couldn’t get a good handle on the tube and I kept bumping it in to just about everything.  We managed to make our way to the top and go down the four person slide without incident.  The kids wanted to do it again and so I had to haul the four person tube up one more time on my own.  Eventually I was able to talk them in to going two and two so that I only had to haul two two person tubes up the top of the water slides.  It was like how I imagine sex with two skinny chicks, much more manageable.

Many of you seem to think I have it out for fat people, and I will admit I do, but the fat people I have it the most out for are the ones who have no self awareness, and there were at least four women who were somewhere between two and three spins wearing bikinis.  The truly unfortunate thing, and this is probably mostly my fault, is that they had a hot tub area and part of it was outside, but you had to go through a trap door to get to the outside part.  I went in the hot tub (which was roughly 93 degrees, about five degrees below my body temperature making it feel like I was in a tub of urine with a bunch of strangers) and decided to go through the trap door, unfortunately immediately behind door number one was one of the bikini clad fat chicks and one of her equally as fat friends.  I immediately made my way for the exit and learned a valuable lesson, communal hot tubs should be avoided at all costs.  This is something I should have picked up on a long time ago considering the experience I had at MVP a few months back.  I was sitting in the hot tub naked, because who brings a suit to sit in a locker room hot tub?  when a guy went up to the stairs and knelt down on them so that his sack and his butthole was about a foot and a half from my face.  Eventually he army crawled from the hot tub to the showers ( a distance of at least three to five yards)  and proceeded to sit Indian style (can you say that anymore) in the shower.

We had arrived at the waterpark around 2 but there were no clocks in the park similar to a casino, I know why a casino doesn’t want you to know what time it is, but I have no idea what the philosophy of the water park is in not alerting its customers to the time of day.  I had my phone in the locker and decided to go find out what time it was, it felt like it had to be at least 4:30, so it was a real punch to the gut when I discovered it was only 3:30 and what was even more disheartening was the fact that when I asked Parker when he wanted to leave he responded “in a really long time!”  I decided to try and make the most of the experience, I kept my phone out and started using that for entertainment, Rothbury has surprisingly good cell service.  However, I realized that I was at the waterpark to hang out with my kids (while possibly getting a communicable and incurable disease) and that I should do my best to interact with them so I gathered up the kids and went down the waterslides a few more times before using my Ace in the hole to get them out of there.  You guys want to go to the Arcade?