The Father-Daughter Routine That Transformed Our Family Life

In the early years, weekend adventures with my daughter followed a script: a park, a pet store, a local bakery or maybe somewhere for lunch. We’d do it every Saturday, on and on. Now my daughter is nearly 9, and the tone and tenor of our routine has changed. The music we listen to matters more—she’s gone from wanting “Baby Shark” to having strong opinions about how Kurt Cobain kind of sounds like a loud, angry version of the Beatles. We still go to bakeries (this is a topic on which we fundamentally agree as father and child), but now we can also talk about what we enjoy at them (both the pastries and the fact that we’re supporting small businesses in the city we love).

Conceptually, what my family has come to call “Dad-urday” grew out of a common parenting-duo problem: Sometimes, even though my wife and I believe in sharing household duties equally, one person will end up doing more kid-related labor than the other. This, I will admit (with some discomfort and guilt), fairly accurately depicts my family situation. Although I do parent throughout the week, I travel a lot for work, which means my wife has had to take on many an early morning alone.

So we designated Saturday mornings as my time to wake up with our daughter: make breakfast, watch some cartoons, then get ready to go out for a bit. I bring my wife a cup of coffee in bed and let her snuggle with our needy, oddball house cats—and allow her a full morning to herself. Dad-urday was a logistical decision that turned into a ritual, one that’s become an anchor to my life: I design my work calendar around it and always try to fly home by Friday night.

[Read: The default-parent problem]

When my daughter was tiny and refused to sleep on a regular schedule at home, our Saturdays involved a lot of naps (hers, not mine), and I acted as a sort of baby-sleep chauffeur. The back of my Volkswagen was the only place she would snooze soundly—after a habitual 30-minute period of screaming-infant Sturm und Drang—so I would drive her around for hours on end, looping through neighborhoods and cruising up and down the hills of our Oregon town.

But soon enough, as my daughter got a little older, Dad-urday became more dynamic: We’d talk over the day’s agenda and debate which park to visit. Some weeks, she’d choose one with elaborate climbing equipment; others, she’d want one with trails and streams to traverse. Afterward we’d visit a store called Pets on Broadway because I love animals and so does she. It’s like a zoo in there, with fish and lizards and guinea pigs and a cat-adoption station, and we’d always get a treat or toy to bring home for our kitties.

Every Dad-urday, we aim to be out of the house until at least the early afternoon. This creates an uninterrupted period in which my daughter is the only person I’m talking to, and vice versa—me the planner, seeking order through scheduling, plotting out the best spot to have lunch ahead of an afternoon movie; she the great adventurer, up for anything, ready to let 10 a.m. become 3 p.m. if the getting is good at the park with the epic zip line.

Now that my daughter is way bigger, our days reflect her changing interests and greater maturity. She’s learning to play the guitar, so I’ve been subjecting her to my Millennial-with-Boomer-tastes CD wallet: Jerry Garcia, the Kinks, J Dilla, XTC. We roam around and visit music shops, plugging guitars into cool amps and fiddling with distortion and delay pedals, behavior that the guitar-shop bros seem willing to tolerate in small doses.

[Read: I still get called daddy-mommy]

Our conversations have also expanded to encompass the wider world and its fundamental truths. The other day, on our way to pick up some kimchi, my daughter demanded to know, in detail, the difference between a pickle (like the ones we had in a jar in the fridge) and kimchi, which I had previously—and not entirely accurately—described as “a style of Korean pickle.” By the end of the chat, I was talking about the different preserving and fermenting traditions of various cuisines, and she was ready to conduct a taste test when we got back home. Another development: Whenever we order lunch, my daughter now has an ideal deli sandwich (turkey, cheddar, sourdough, light mayo). I find it charming, but it also feels like some kind of passage into adulthood, the fact that my child knows herself well enough to dictate her preferences to the deli guy. If her grandfather or great-grandfather, who both knew their way around a deli, were here, they would be positively verklempt.

When we go to a park, I get to see other ways in which my daughter’s personality has expanded. I listen to her rattling off the name and subspecies of every bird we glimpse. I watch her being kind to younger kids on the climbing wall. She is almost too big for a lot of the equipment—on certain sets of monkey bars, her toes nearly touch the ground—yet she calls over every couple of minutes, asking me to observe some feat of gymnastic glory. She still needs me to watch her on the playground, at least for now.

I can imagine that to some people, “Dad-urday” might just sound like a cutesy rebrand for “parenting.” But something about putting a name to the ritual has helped underscore for me exactly how precious my time with my daughter is—and how swiftly it moves. A consistent routine we share each week allows me to easily track her growth, as with height marks on a doorframe. And in my mind, under “Dad-urday,” I now have a memory archive of hundreds of Saturdays with my kid, which allows me to reflect on the changes over the course of her childhood, and the changes within myself, more clearly.

Of course, nobody bats a thousand. Some weekends, if my daughter has a Saturday-morning birthday party or some other peg in her byzantine social schedule, we opt instead for a cheeky “Sun-dad.” And every so often we’ll miss a weekend. That makes the rest of the week feel out of balance, as if I’m missing some core part of myself. You see, I’ve come to love who I am on Dad-urday: gentler, more patient, more present and aware of the beauty of the world, because my daughter and I are seeing it together.

Before I wrote this essay, by the way, I sat down with my kid and talked with her about it. I’m careful about what I share online, and like many parents, I feel conflicted about creating content out of intimate moments. But my daughter told me, in her kind, self-assured way, that she thought writing about Dad-urday was a great idea—because she wanted other kids to get to have Dad-urdays, too.