The alarm went off at 5:00 a.m. and we sprung out of bed. My wife, Lauren, and I knew it was going to be a crazy day. Of course, every day is crazy when you have two toddlers but this was shaping up to be a whole other level. Our three-year-old son, George, was scheduled to be at a surgery center in a little over an hour to have another round of tubes put in to help with ear infections.
With Lauren's parents watching our 1 1/2-year-old daughter, Annette, and a sleepy George in the car, we set off. It was a short procedure but that doesn't matter to a kid.
By mid-morning we tucked a groggy, cranky little boy on grandma and grandpa's couch to watch cartoons and recover. As he got cozy, George looked up at us and in his little voice asked, "When can we go get ice cream?"
It was a question he'd been asking for weeks ever since he stood on his tippy toes at Carvel to look into the glass case and spotted pink cotton candy flavored ice cream. Next time, I had told him, as he devoured a cone he already had ordered. After we found out that George needed to get new ear tubes, Lauren and I thought the promise of that ice cream might be just what he needed to help him get through it. We talked about it with him every single day. I made him a promise that on the day the doctor "fixed" his ears, he could have his pink cotton candy ice cream.
But on that day, things were about to get a lot more complicated. When we got back with George, Lauren's parents told us that Annette had a fever. At the same time, we also got a call from the company that had sold us marble tile for a bathroom renovation. What our contractor had installed without our approval was damaged and we had him tear it out. Now, the tile company owner said he was in town for one day and that if I could get up to its warehouse TODAY he would let me dig through the crates and pick out tile that satisfied us. So Lauren and I decided to divide and conquer. She put Annette in the car and headed for the doctor while I set off for a long drive to the tile warehouse. But before I walked out the door, I kissed George and told him that he should rest up because as soon as I got home, we were going to get the special ice cream.
The entire day was also complicated by the fact that I was leaving for the airport at 6:00 p.m. to catch a flight to Washington, D.C. in advance of an early morning TV shoot.
As I frantically sifted through one dusty crate after another in a dingy warehouse trying to pick out tile, I kept glancing at the clock, calculating how long it would take me to get back to get George, have ice cream, bring him back, kiss my family, grab my suitcase, jump into a waiting taxi and get to the airport.
I left the warehouse with 30 cases of tile and called my wife - by now back with our daughter - and asked her to get George ready. When I pulled up, she brought him out to the car and we were on our way.
When he and I walked hand in hand into Carvel, his face lit up and he ran over to the glass case. I made him order. "Please may I have the pink ice cotton candy ice cream with sprinkles?" he excitedly asked the woman behind the counter.
He gingerly carried the cone over to a seat and I hoisted him up onto a stool in the front window.
For the next 20 minutes, nothing in the world could have taken us away from the sheer delight of that moment.
As I took an occasional lick to keep it from melting all over, George and I talked about trucks and dinosaurs while he enjoyed that ice cream cone like a kid truly should.
I reveled in it because I knew how much it meant to him -- and me. Wild horses couldn't keep me from fulfilling that promise I'd made to my son.
I did what I said I was going to do.
I reflected on that simple yet powerful concept as I settled into the back of the airport taxi, as I watched by flight get cancelled at midnight after sitting at the airport for five hours, as my father-in-law came and got me, as I started driving to Washington, D.C. at 1:00 a.m. and as I pulled into the hotel at 5:00 a.m. just in time to take a quick shower before heading to work. It had been a whirlwind 24 hours -- like the end of Goodfellas when mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) frantically races around as a surveillance helicopter tails him overhead -- but it was all worth it. I had kept my word to my son. And I hopefully taught him an important life lesson along the way.
When did it become acceptable to say one thing and do another? On a daily basis, it seems, I'm let down by promises that are made and not kept.
A mortgage company promising for two months that a real estate closing is only "a day or two away". A prop company promising to bring a crucial piece to my biggest television shoot of the year and then calling late the night before and telling me that it can't help me and abruptly hanging up. Contractors only delivering on promises after we step in to make sure things are done right. A car dealer promising you for nine months that a check to reimburse you for a botched oil job that damaged your car is ready and then every time you call or stop by to pick it up it's nowhere to be seen.
The list goes on.
Lateness, poor quality, lack of pride and effort, flat out lies. It's maddening the way it seems to have just become part of our way of life.
It happens so regularly I've started to wonder if I'm just expecting too much of people. But I'm not.
When you say you're going to doing something -- do it. It seems so basic but it's clearly not.
Certainly, circumstances sometimes require flexibility and despite my best efforts, I'm sure there are people out there who feel like I've let them down in the past. But it's bigger than that. It's a lack of respect. It's a lack of not caring. Maybe I sound demanding - and maybe I am sometimes - but it's because I don't think it's unreasonable to hold people to a certain level of responsibility.
Lauren and I talk a lot about setting examples for our children. We work really hard in hopes of not being late, to finish projects we start, to keep trying when something seems hard, to manage our schedules to keep appointments that we've made. We don't make promises to our children unless we are virtually certain they can be kept.
Of course, children need to learn to deal with disappointment but more importantly; they need to know that when their parents say they're going to do something, they really mean it.
