During the early years, my daughter and I would go on weekend excursions to places like parks, pet stores, local bakeries, or possibly lunch. We would continue doing it every Saturday. My daughter is almost nine years old now, and our routine’s tenor and tone have changed. The music we listen to is more important; she no longer wants “Baby Shark” and now strongly believes that Kurt Cobain sounds like a loud, irate version of the Beatles. We still visit bakeries (this is something that both father and child firmly believe in), but we can now discuss what we like about them, including the pastries and the fact that we’re helping out small businesses in the city we love.
The idea behind what my family now refers to as “Dad-urday” originated from a typical parenting-duo issue: Even though my wife and I think that everyone should contribute equally to household chores, there are times when one of us ends up doing more work related to the children than the other. I’ll confess that this describes my family situation pretty well, albeit with some uneasiness and guilt. My wife has had to take on many early mornings by herself because I travel a lot for work, even though I parent throughout the week.
Therefore, we decided that Saturday mornings would be my wake-up time with our daughter. We would prepare breakfast, watch cartoons, and then prepare to go out for a while. I give my wife a cup of coffee in bed, let her cuddle with our needy, quirky house cats, and give her the entire morning to herself. Dad-urday began as a practical choice but has since evolved into a custom that has become a pillar of my life. I plan my work schedule around it and make it a point to get home by Friday night.
Our Saturdays were filled with naps (hers, not mine), and I played the role of baby-sleep chauffeur when my daughter was small and wouldn’t go to sleep on a regular basis at home. After a routine 30-minute period of screaming infant Sturm und Drang, she would only fall asleep soundly in the back of my Volkswagen, so I would spend hours driving her around our Oregon town, looping through neighborhoods and speeding up and down the hills.
However, Dad-urday quickly became more lively as my daughter grew older. We would discuss the day’s plans and decide which park to visit. She would pick one with complex climbing gear one week and one with streams and trails the next. After that, since she and I both adore animals, we would go to a store called Pets on Broadway. With fish, lizards, guinea pigs, and a cat adoption station, it’s like a zoo inside. We also always get a treat or toy to take home for our cats.
We try to leave the house by early afternoon every Dad-urday. My daughter is the great adventurer, willing to do anything, and is willing to let 10 a.m. turn into 3 p.m. if the going is good at the park with the epic zip line. This creates an uninterrupted period in which I am the only person I am talking to, and vice versa. I am the planner, seeking order through scheduling, and I am planning the best place to have lunch before an afternoon movie.
My daughter is much older now, and her growing maturity and shifting interests are reflected in our days. I’ve been showing her my CD wallet, which contains songs by artists like Jerry Garcia, the Kinks, J Dilla, and XTC, because she’s learning to play the guitar. We wander around and go to music stores, plugging guitars into fancy amplifiers and tinkering with delay and distortion pedals—behavior that the guys who work at the guitar shops seem to be willing to put up with in moderation.
Our discussions have also broadened to include the larger world and its essential realities. On our way to get some kimchi the other day, my daughter insisted on knowing the exact distinction between kimchi, which I had previously—and not totally correctly—described as “a style of Korean pickle,” and a pickle, such as the ones we kept in a jar in the refrigerator. She was prepared to do a taste test when we returned home, and by the end of our conversation, I was discussing the various fermenting and preservation customs of different cuisines.
Another change is that my daughter now gets the perfect deli sandwich (turkey, cheddar, sourdough, and light mayo) whenever we order lunch. The fact that my child knows herself well enough to tell the deli guy what she wants is endearing to me, but it also feels like a step into adulthood. Her great-grandfather and grandfather, who were both familiar with delis, would be positively unkempt if they were present.
I get to observe additional facets of my daughter’s development when we visit a park. I hear her rattle off each bird’s name and subspecies that we catch a glimpse of. On the climbing wall, I observe her showing kindness to younger children. She calls over every few minutes to ask me to watch her perform a gymnastic feat, even though she is almost too big for most of the equipment—on some sets of monkey bars, her toes almost touch the ground. For the time being at least, she still needs me to keep an eye on her on the playground.
I can see how “Dad-urday” could just sound like a cutesy rebranding of “parenting” to some people. But for some reason, giving the ritual a name has made it clearer to me how valuable and fleeting my time with my daughter is. We follow a weekly routine that makes it easy for me to monitor her development, much like height markers on a doorframe. Additionally, I now have a mental archive of hundreds of Saturdays spent with my child under the name “Dad-urday,” which makes it easier for me to think back on how I’ve changed as well as how she has changed throughout her childhood.
No one bats a thousand, of course. Some weekends, we choose to have a cheeky “Sun-dad” instead, if my daughter has a birthday party on Saturday morning or another event on her hectic social calendar. Additionally, we occasionally miss a weekend. I feel as though I’m missing a fundamental aspect of who I am, which throws the rest of the week off balance. You see, because my daughter and I are experiencing the world together, I have grown to love who I am on Dad-urday: kinder, more patient, more present, and conscious of its beauty.
By the way, I sat down with my child and discussed it with her before writing this essay. Like many parents, I’m cautious about what I post online and struggle with the idea of making content out of private moments. However, in her sweet, confident manner, my daughter told me that she thought it was a great idea to write about Dad-urday because she wanted other kids to have Dad-urdays as well.
