Learner Dad: The trick to enjoying your kids is to get away from them on a regular basis

Sheep's Head, Co Cork.  Picture: Eamonn Farrell/Rollingnews.ie

I took a day off recently. Not a day off to spend time with the kids, or catch up on things around the house, because where’s the fun in that ? Instead, myself and a buddy drove west and did a four-hour hike around the tip of the Sheep’s Head peninsula. It was one of those magic days where the light changes quickly and it feel s like you’re in a different country every 10 minutes. My friend has kids around the same age as mine, so we spent most of our time talking about anything except kids because no one wants to listen to another person banging on about their children. 

My buddy did say he’d come back again with his kids to do the hike some other day. I won’t be copying him.

I can’t be certain, but my guess is that seagulls aren’t that gone on scenery. We might envy them floating above a solitary cliff in West Cork, but they’re not there for the views. My kids are with the seagulls on all this - wild Atlantic coastline isn’t really their thing. They’re too young to notice that the landscape around Sheep’s Head is up there with anything else on the island. (I don’t remember noticing it myself when I was their age.)

Now that I think of it, they don’t like open country. Kids like looking down at the ground rather than up at the sky. My two like forests and spongy grass and firing sticks into a slow-moving stream. They also like branching off the path and exploring for themselves, which isn’t something I’d recommend around the exposed cliff edges on Sheep’s Head. I’m an anxious person at the best of times – I’d just ruin everyone’s day micro-managing their route around the headland.

So, I’m keeping Sheep’s Head for myself. If I go there with any family member, it will be my wife, because that’s where we went on our first date. I remember she wore really dressy flip-flops because she was watching a lot of Sex and the City back then. I remember this because it’s hard to enjoy the view when your co-hiker keeps asking why you didn’t warn her not to wear dressy flip-flops on a cliff and bogland walk. I fancied her too much to give a smart answer, so here we are, still together after 17 years. It’s going well, in fairness, so far .

Speaking of years flying by, I’ve never been more aware of my age, thanks to the vaccine cohorts, which is what we must call age groups   now . I’m 54, so my movements over the next few months will be determined by the fact that I’m aged between 50 and 59. I’m still not sure how that happened. I remember all my life hearing health advice aimed at older people and thinking that has nothing to do with me. And now, I’m coming up on a bus pass. It would be nice to say I don’t feel a day beyond 30, but try and tell that to my knees when I was coming down the side of the mountain in Sheep’s Head. I’m at that age when going up is the easy bit.

Do you know what? It’s fine. I don’t mind getting old as long as I can enjoy doing things with my kids. (Hopefully, I’ll be too old to help them rear their own kids because I’m only doing this once. Alright?)

The trick to enjoying your kids is to get away from them on a regular basis . For full effect, make sure you are out of the house before they get up. I set off for Sheep’s Head at 7am, long before they got up. My wife tells me that breakfast and getting them out to school was actually easier with only parent on hand. I get that. It’s easier if there is only parent to manage the bedtime madness as well - they only need one person doling out instructions.

So there will be more days off for hiking with my friends, or a trip-down-memory-lane date with my wife. Hopefully this time she’ll wear the right pair of shoes. And we’ll leave the kids with someone else.