When I get in from work on an evening, the first few minutes are usually filled with a mad scramble around the house to clear the decks ready for dinner - to impose some kind of order on what would otherwise descend into outright mayhem. Shouts of “tidy up time” are reacted to by the children with varying amounts of enthusiasm - with contributing factors including the current cartoon on the television, whichever jigsaw is half finished, or how much fun is being had outside.
Dinner inevitably arrives at the table, and shouts of “time to wash your hands” ring out around the house.
We sit down, and the children know what’s coming next (they will remind me if I forget).
“So then - what did you do today?”
I usually try to vary whoever goes first around from evening to evening. It all started out as a crafty way to get our youngest to talk. If presented with an opportunity to get everybody’s attention she turns into Mrs Motormouth, where otherwise she might sit fiddling with a piece of cutlery (which invariably ends up clattering onto the floor - closely followed by said child in hot pursuit).
They never ask what I did today. They did once, when I asked why they didn’t, and they never have again. There’s a simple reason why, which I shall illustrate with a fictional account of what might happen this evening.
“What did you do today Dad?”
“I put the ground-work in for a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 solution - I had to build a webservice, integrate it with SharePoint (no easy task), build the shell of six webparts, connect all of them up to a logging framework, test it all out, then integrate jQuery, put some basic javascript in place to allow asynchronous calls to the webservice from the webparts, and then try it all out. While doing all of that I fought with the Webpart Gallery in Sharepoint that didn’t want to do anything it was told, I also fought with Web Solution Packages, which didn’t behave as expected, and with Internet Explorer, which didn’t seem to want to forget anything all day long”.
So you see… there’s a pretty good reason the kids never ask me what I did today…