Last week was Family Day in Ontario. After some finagling, my wife, our two teenage boys, and I ended up on the couch watching The Hangover (our oldest’s pick).
The boys hadn’t seen it before. It’s a comedy about four friends who wake up in a trashed Las Vegas hotel room with no memory of the night before, a tiger in the bathroom, and a baby in the closet. There’s a scene early on where Zach Galifianakis, completely deadpan, gives this sincere speech about the four of them being a wolf pack. It’s absurd. It works.
Our family used to be more of a wolf pack. Not in a Vegas-gone-wrong way. Just in the way that families are when the kids are young. You move together. Weekends, dinners, errands. Nobody had to send out a text survey; it was just how things worked.
It’s different now. The boys are both teenagers. They have their own lives, their own schedules, their own plans that don’t involve us. Dinner happens, but not always together. Someone’s out. Someone’s eating late. You stop making the same amount of food without really noticing when it happened.
My wife and I have more time to ourselves now, which is good. But we’re still running on old habits that made sense when the kids were ten. We have a family calendar on our phones just to keep track of who is where. Less assuming. More coordinating. What do we even do with all this teen-free time?
Four people, one house, four different schedules most days.
Parenting gets quieter at this stage. It’s not sad. It’s just a shift. The job is raising them until they don’t need you moving them around anymore.
The wolf pack is still here. Family Day reminded me of that. We just don’t travel together as much as we used to. Someone still texts when they’re on their way home. Dinner together still happens most nights. We still end up on the same couch sometimes. Which is fine. That’s kind of the whole job, isn’t it?
The Hangover was a solid pick though.
In Case You Missed It
As I just talked about, finding time to get the whole family together can be tough. So is keeping up on everything I’ve been writing about this month. Here’s a quick recap.
How Late Should a 16-Year-Old Be Out? – Curfews are one of those things every parent handles differently, and every teenager thinks is unreasonable. I looked at what other parents actually do, what the research says about sleep, and landed somewhere practical. The short version: maturity matters more than the number on the clock.
Authors Like James Patterson – If you’ve burned through Alex Cross and Michael Bennett and need somewhere to go next, this is the list. Michael Connelly, John Sandford, Harlan Coben. Fast pacing, recurring characters, and the same “one more chapter” problem.
Power Rankings TV 2026 – Edition 1 – First rankings of the year. Industry S4 is at the top and earning it. The Pitt S2 is holding strong. Updated monthly all year.
How AI Helped Me Win a Customer Service Battle – My Bose earbuds fell apart in under two years. Bose offered me a discount on new ones. I used AI to fight back and actually won. It went full lawyer on their support team, and it was something to watch.
