Hi, my name is Jeff and I want to be the perfect Dad.

I’ve said it, and I mean it. I want to be everything for my kids. I don’t want to miss anything. Not a single sporting event. Not a single academic event. Not a concert (ok, I’ll admit that I might be willing to skip the early-years band concerts). Not a Prom or Homecoming. Nothing.

But it doesn’t work that way when you have eight kids. It doesn’t work that way when you kids are in so many activities that Google Calendar warns you that you have too many events scheduled for one day. It’s not reality to be everywhere for everybody for everything. But that doesn’t change the fact that I want to.

And oddly enough, I succeed more than I give myself credit for.

This weekend was a great example. One of my daughters had her Scholars Recognition Dinner at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, IA. That entails a 7 hour drive from Kansas just to get here. The dinner is the highlight of the academic year (outside of graduation for Seniors), and I’ve been to the first three, so I wasn’t going to miss this one.

The only snag in the plan was that we’re in the part of the high school track season where the meets are held on Fridays because there are so many teams. So at 3pm I drove to a high school track meet to watch two of my three high-schoolers. They’re both amazing athletes, and I love watching them compete. They are so focused and driven to do better. At 8:15 I finally had to admit that it was time to leave. I had to miss the 800, 300 hurdles, and 4×400…so I felt like I’d failed. It didn’t matter that I’d seen half their events, I was leaving before the meet was over. So I notched a mark in my personal failure totem pole and drove home.

I picked up my packed bag, loaded the van, and told my wife and younger son it was time to leave. We rolled out around 8:45 for our trip to Iowa. On the way, we let our son drive for a while to get hours for his instructional permit. From the back seat, while I was trying to grab a nap, I snuck out a tweet about my terrifying ride as my wife supervised his driving. He did great, but it didn’t lessen the terror every parent has when their kid is a new driver.

We trundled along, finally arriving at 4:00am in Storm Lake, IA. We made really good time, and having made the trip so many times alone, it was nice to have two other drivers to share the driving.
We then met up with our daughter and had a really nice time. She and I stuffed animals (a monkey and a dolphin…with legs…don’t ask), we read about 30 research posters from the just-completed Scholar’s Day presentation, we walked around campus, and generally enjoyed just being together as a family.

Later we attended the Alpha Chi Honor Society induction ceremony where Laura was honored as a three year member of this highly prestigious honor society.

That’s when my next area of personal conflict and feeling of failure started to creep in. You see, it was Prom for Hutchinson High School, and my older son was going. I initially wrote “going to the dance”, but Prom is so much more than that. It’s group photos, individual photos, dinner, Promenade, dinner, the dance, and After Prom. And I wasn’t there. Fortunately, he has an amazing girlfriend who has an even more amazing Mom who started sending photos of the kids. There is no way that I can ever repay Deann for keeping that lifeline to Kansas open for me. I tried to be circumspect about looking at the photos, but honestly it was tough. I got somewhere in the vicinity of 50 photos, so I was a pretty happy camper. Many of them were the standard Prom shots, but there were a couple that were simply priceless because they captured the true nature of these nutty kids. Yet the feelings of failure would creep in around the edges of the photos. I wanted to be there so badly, but I wanted to be here in Iowa as well.

Over the next several weeks, and probably months, we are going to have lots and lots of these head-to-head, make-a-freaking-decision types of scenarios. We’ve got graduations, track meets, National Honor Society inductions, and all sorts of other events. The calendar is covered with events that overlap…spanning from Maine to Colorado and Iowa to Texas.

I know that I’m going to have to decide on where I’m going to be. And I know, intellectually, that I’m going to make the best decision for everybody involved. But that doesn’t change the fact that I want to be everywhere for everybody for everything.

Don’t get me wrong. I really try to take my own advice and try to “be where I am”. I carefully weigh the needs of each of the kids, and try to decide where to go based on what’s best for everybody. I know in my head that I can’t do it all, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still want to. And honestly, I also know that the kids know that. They are great, and they usually will advise me to go to the other kid’s event. They know when I don’t attend something, I’m there in spirit. On the rare occasions when they actually say “hey, this is really important to me”, I make sure to pass that on to the other kids whose events I’m going to miss. And I’ve never really had anybody throw a fit.

But honestly, it’s hard. We made a decision (ok, several of them) to have a large family. There was no way to really foresee what life was going to be like. Sure, you can kind of think about what it’s going to be like, but until you have events popping up all over, you have wonderfully successful kids, and you have kids confident enough in themselves to travel all over the globe by themselves, you simply can’t prepare for what it will be like.

But I’m learning everyday that the time that I spend with the kids at their events, whether as a spectator or participant, is priceless. I’m doing what I can to stay in contact with them, even when I’m not there.

Most of all, I’m trying to help them understand how much I love them!