A coworker of mine took her kids to Legoland years ago. She mentioned it in passing, and that offhand story is the reason I ended up taking my kids there too. Her kids are almost grown now. Lately she talks about how few summers she had left with them, and how fast they went.
That landed hard. Someday isn’t someday. It’s a countdown.
I’m a CPA, so I did the math. My daughter is seven. My son is five. She has about eleven summers left before she’s eighteen. He has thirteen. The summers where a trip with Dad is the highlight of their year? Fewer than that. Probably a lot fewer.
I don’t get those back.
In my last post, I admitted that I’d confused being nearby with being present. I was in the room, but I was on my phone, half-watching TV, or checking out after work. And I’d built complexity everywhere, systems I enjoyed that were quietly crowding out the stuff that mattered. I said this newsletter would be that process, documented out loud.
So here’s the update. Not a philosophy. Just what I’m actually doing.
The phone goes in another room
The phone was the worst offender, so it went first.
My vice wasn’t games or sports scores. It was reading. One more article, one more thread, one more thing I’d convinced myself was worth knowing. It felt productive, which is exactly what made it sneaky. Reading about how to be a better dad while my kids were three feet away asking me to watch something.
My phone’s less present now. Some nights I’m deliberate about it and put it in another room entirely. The first few minutes feel weird, like I’m forgetting something. Then the weird goes away and I’m just there, building whatever my son is building or listening to my daughter explain a book plot in more detail than any book has ever had.
Nobody gives you a medal for this. The kids don’t notice the phone is gone. They just notice you’re not.
Small counts
I used to think an adventure had to be a trip. It doesn’t. A movie counts. A Saturday morning at the farmers market counts. A sunrise donut run counts. Jesse Itzler calls these mini-adventures, and the magic is that they’re frequent and cheap, so you actually do them.
My test now is simple. Will I remember this in a year? Movies pass. Errands don’t. If it passes, it goes on the calendar.
And I mean an actual calendar. I built a digital version of a wall calendar, the whole year at a glance, and the most motivating thing on it is the blank space. Every empty box is a memory I haven’t made yet. It’s a quiet dare. Fill me.
Repeat the good ones
Not long ago I took the kids for one night to a little Gold Rush town in the Sierra foothills, not far from home. It was the second year in a row. Same hotel, same burger stop when we rolled in, same dinner spot downtown, same froyo after.
I almost changed it up. I’m glad I didn’t.
They remembered everything. Where they sat last year. Which flavor they got. The repetition wasn’t boring to them, it was the point. We’re building traditions now, not just trips.
We had the hotel pool to ourselves that afternoon. I relaxed a few rules: later bedtime, a movie they were barely old enough for. Somehow that made it easier, not harder. The next morning both of them climbed into my bed and just stayed there for a while. Nobody was in a hurry. Neither was I.
That’s the memory. Not the gold panning, not the view from the tallest bridge in California. The snuggle.
Use the points, stop optimizing them
Remember the complexity I confessed to? A big piece of it was points. Years of earning airline miles and hotel points, tracking them, optimizing them, and then mostly sitting on them.
Bill Perkins makes the case in Die With Zero that dying with a big unspent balance is a failure of planning, not a win. Same with points. That night in the foothills was a free-night certificate that was about to expire. That’s the whole strategy now. I’m not chasing the perfect redemption anymore. Points aren’t a trophy, and they aren’t a hobby. They’re fuel for exactly this.
Time is the real budget
Money you can usually make back. A summer with a seven-year-old you can’t. The hard part of Die With Zero isn’t the money math. It’s admitting the good windows close while you’re still alive and healthy. The kids age out of wanting to come. Your knees stop cooperating. So the question isn’t how many years you have left. It’s how many years you have left to do this specific thing well.
I’m still not writing from the other side of this. Some nights the phone wins. But the gap between what I intend and how my days actually go is smaller than it was when I wrote that first post, and I can point to the boxes I’ve filled.
If you’re a parent, here’s the only advice I’d offer. Count the summers. Then spend them.
Jeff