What is Dad Week you ask? It is basically a vacation – or maybe even a “staycation” (ugh, so pop culture – thanks for that George!)
As a family, we’ve already been on some cool trips this year. Walt Disney World in January and Las Vegas in March for the NASCAR race. For summer fun, the kids have stayed busy with friends around town, local camps and activities, camping, etc…
Sometime earlier in the summer, I suggested that I would take a week off to just be home and do a bunch of fun things with the kids.
One key was to schedule this before the kids go back to school – which is next week!
Then, we had to pick out the things we wanted to do and get them scheduled. With no shortage of ideas to fill up six or seven days, we had to have a process to whittle things down a bit. At work, our development team (and some of our other operations teams) use the Agile process. We use Rally software.
If you are not familiar with the Agile process, in a nutshell, you plan development in ‘iterations’. There is a careful planning process that includes product management or others needing development work brining their “stories”. Stories are requirements or tasks to complete or progress a project. While the Rally software allows this to all be done electronically, our teams have found that using post-it notes helps in the acceptance, scheduling and tracking with our teams. So, long story short, we did this at home.
Each of us created three “stories” – things we wanted to do during Dad Week. One thing could cost money (e.g. the Movies) and two things had to not cost money (or be very minimal in cost). We then sat down and worked together to accepts stories and schedule them throughout the Dad Week days. The kids came up with great suggestions, and we’ve been having a blast. You can see the photo of our Dad Week Board above. Here is some of the list:
- Water World
- Family Guitar Hero Contest
- Out To Lunch
- Go Hiking
- Hit a Movie
- Splurge Breakfast (Waffles, Bacon, Sausage and real maple syrup) [Thanks Neil!]
- Kids Plan and Cook Dinner Night
- Erie Go Kart Track Day
- Reading at the Library
And so on… You get the idea. No doubt this is keeping us busy, but we are having a great time. Dad Week is over half way completed. Today we did “Out to Lunch” – Oskar Blues in Lyons, Colorado, and then “Go Hiking” – Heil Valley Ranch near Boulder. We’ve got much more to do the next few days, of course check here for updates. We should have plenty of photos to share too.
I called it Dad Week, but four days into it, it probably should just be called Family Week. Missing work is always less than ideal for me – I love my work – but family and times like these are important – no matter how simple they seem. This has been really great so far and hopefully will be a family tradition from here on out!
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August 22nd, 2008
