As I get older there is one thing that I really regret, and that is not making more time for my kids when they were little. My two oldest kids are now 19 and 21 years old, and it seem like just yesterday that they were kids playing in the back yard.
The youngest two are 14 and 12 years old. My ex-wife and I have been divorced for about 8 years, so I have missed out on a major part of their lives. When these two come over to my house (which is every other weekend) I try to spend time with them, but we have so little of it. I feel like we pick the kids up, go home, them take them back. The weekend just flies by so quick.
Korey, my 14 year old son enjoys online computer games, hiking, camping and hunting. In a lot of ways he is just like me. In February of 2007 we took our first real camping trip in the woods. Even though the night time air got a little too cold for our sleeping bags, we all had a good time.
One of Koreys favorite computer games is Fortress-Forever. While Korey was spending the summer with my wife and I, he asked about a website. I just happen to do a little website development on the side, so I put him together a landing page and a forum. In case anyone is interested, the website name is Fortress Traning and then there is his Team Fortress Forum.
The first landing page was built with mambo, but the bridge with the SMF forum did not work well. I took the mambo site down and went with mkportal, well that CMS lacks certain SEO (look that term up) features. I just happened to be running wordpress one a couple of my sites, so I removed mkportal and installed wordpress as the landing page. So far everything is going good, but when changing themes I realized that the new theme lost the meta description. So that set the site back a few weeks in google ranking.
Building the site seems that it is more important to me then it is to Korey. Maybe its a way of telling him that I miss and love him.
Kristian, my wonderful 12 year old daughter, she wants a website as well. But what she wants is something closer to myspace. When I ask her about the details and what she wants, the list is a mine long. She wants a blog, customize profiles, forum, maybe a picture gallery,,,,,,,,,,,, I thought about installing wordpress as a landing page for her domain name, and get a VBulletin license. VBulletin has a lot of features that she wants, like customized profiles and a picture gallery. But I dont know if she is doing this spur of the moment or whether its a long term interest.
My step daughter asked about building her a website, so I put together a simple SMF forum for her. Her site is The Parent Forum. I dont know how Kandi was lucky enough to find that domain name, it just kinda fell into her lap.
This weekend I am planning on going deer hunting and hopefully will get something. The weekend of November 22nd, that is Koreys weekend. The plans are to spend most of the day saturday hunting, and sunday morning. I hope he can get a deer this season. Last year he got a 6 point, so I hope he can do just as good this year.
Kristian on the other hand does not seem too interested in hunting. She would rather stay home and watch TV. But she has promised me that she will go.
No matter how many pictures I take, its never enough. When the kids go back to their moms, that is when I think about what we should have done over the past weekend. Those regrets are then turned into plans for the next time I see them. We already have plans for the second weekend of May, 2010. That is when Iron Man 2 is going to be released.
