The Weekly’s associate editor Michael Sheather spent his weekend pretending to be a robot because he wants to be involved in his children’s lives.
I love my kids a lot: I must, otherwise I’d never have dressed as a robot. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever write. But it’s also the truth.
I spent my Friday night in a tin shed at The Cataract Scout Park south of Campbelltown in NSW making a robot suit. That’s another sentence I never imagined writing. But it happened.
My usual Friday night involves whipping up something French and fabulous in the kitchen, and washing it down with a fine bottle of red wine, but that was never going to happen this weekend.
No, this was a weekend was something else.
In my other life away from the Weekly office, I’m a scout leader. I have three children and they are all involved in scouting, just as I was when I was kid growing up in country NSW.
As city kids, I wanted them to know what it’s like to be in the outdoors, to camp, to cook their own food on an open fire, to be resilient, to get dirty, to fall out of a tree, and not see their world only through a computer screen. Scouting lets them do all that. And occasionally, it also means they get to see their dad make a complete fool of himself.
Hence the robot suit. I was helping other leaders run an activity base at the NSW State rally, an annual event for more than 1000 scouts and several hundred leaders from all across the state. It’s a competition to find the best scout patrol and patrol leader in NSW. And an opportunity to see which scout leader can come up with the goofiest costume.
There were fairies, wizards, bumble bees, Mr Potato Head, Buzz Lightyear and a bunch of leaders from Caringbah decked out as the members of ABBA.
We designed and made our suits out of bits of air conditioning ducting, silver coated insulation sheets and silver tape. I’d never done that before, and to be honest I was surprised by my own ingenuity.
But not as surprised as my fourteen year old son Tom, who was mortified when he showed up at our activity with his friends to be confronted by his father dressed from head to toe in silver frosting.
He didn’t recognise me at first. Not until I waved. Then he looked a little closer and I saw his jaw drop. The he put his hands over his eyes and shook his head. I could almost hear him thinking ‘What has he done this time?’
He didn’t want to be photographed with me, but being a daggy dad is, of course, a time honoured tradition and something that should be recorded for posterity. It’s something he’ll remember for the rest of his life, I hope.
What’s the daggiest, silliest thing you’ve ever done for your kids? Send us a photo, tell us your story and we’ll publish the best online.
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