Donuts with Dads

This morning Autumn’s school held its annual Donuts With Dads breakfast.  Her last school had this event, but she was unable to participate since my husband Ben was working the day shift.  He works nights and evenings now, so it was just a matter of him staying awake a few more hours, a small sacrifice for some rare quality time without Farrah or me horning in.  Since Farrah is the ultimate Daddy's girl and my husband works so much, Autumn's chances of one-on-one time outside of specially scheduled events are usually slim.

The way this works is the dads and kids come in before school during the normal breakfast time.  Since the cafeteria is divided, the kids who aren’t participating get one side, and the kids who are get the other.  The pairs stop by a table manned by parent volunteers to get a donut and a carton of milk before sitting down and enjoying themselves.  Autumn’s previous school was pretty small, so the whole school did this on the same morning.  This school, however, is quite large--there were seven classes of kindergartners before the school split into two to give primary students (preschool, kindergarten, and first graders) their own building, and these numbers were pretty much in line with the rest of the grades.  There is a healthy-sized crowd, but it is less chaotic than if there were hundreds of dads swarming in at one time.  The line wasn't horribly long, and they had a leisurely breakfast with time to talk and mingle with other father-daughter pairs.

This was a really good experience for them, second only to the Girl Scouts father-daughter sock hop they attended several years ago.  It would be nice to find a way to make little outings like this happen more often.