Monday, April 01, 2013

When Your Kid Decides to Turn You Down for a Date



I feel like Curtis gets middle-childed sometimes. We spend a lot of time working (or, rather, fighting) with Paige on her homework and piano. Tate requires energy and attention about every second of the day. And then there's Curtis, just doing his own thing.

So I thought we should do something extra fun, just the two of us. Curtis is becoming increasingly interested in sports. He loves playing soccer and football with me. Lately, we've also been having a great time drawing the logos for all of the NFL teams.

I called in some favors at work and scored some really good tickets to the Jazz/Trailblazers game. Curtis seemed pretty excited about going to his first NBA game--we talked about it for weeks--and I was probably looking forward to it even more.

Tonight was the big night.

Traci also had plans, so we had arranged to have her parents watch Paige and Tate. But when we all met up  at her parents, Traci told me there was a slight problem.

"Curtis says he's not going."

"What?" I replied. "You're kidding."

"He's been talking about going all day," she said, "but when we got in the car, he said he didn't want to go."

If I only had one word to describe Curtis, I wouldn't hesitate to say "stubborn."

I asked and I bribed and I threatened and then I bribed again. But I knew he wasn't going.

I'm not sure why he didn't want to go. I'm guessing that watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoons for the thousandth time at Grandma's just seemed like a sweeter deal than sitting on the 8th row at Jazz game with his dad.

And it kind of broke my heart.

I went to the game without him.

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