Recently, with my wife busy preparing for an upcoming exam, I’ve been taking on more full-time solo parenting duties over the weekends. Stepping away from my usual routine to spend uninterrupted father-son time with our two-and-a-half-year-old, Terry, has been physically exhausting — but watching his little silhouette constantly exploring the world around him fills my heart completely.

It has been six months since I wrote about his second birthday, and in that time the perpetual motion machine has only gotten faster.

1. KidsQuest: An Engine of Endless Joy

Terry at the KidsQuest water table

The solo-dad adventures started on the Sunday of the recent Labor Day long weekend, when I took Terry to the KidsQuest Museum in Bellevue. It turns out this place is an absolute sanctuary for burning off a toddler’s boundless energy.

Spread across two floors, Terry was like a tireless little engine, looping through the exhibits over and over. His attention shifted seamlessly from one magical corner to the next: one second he was earnestly brushing a farm “cow,” and the next he was off to the pretend kitchen to cook a meal. He picked apples from the apple tree, whipped up colorful toy ice cream, and transformed into a busy delivery driver, loading boxes onto a truck and watching them roll down the conveyor belt.

He was especially mesmerized by the water dynamics table and anything involving mechanics. He climbed the stairs into the treehouse, crawled through tunnels hunting for treasure, rode a little tractor, and played with all sorts of toy cars. He even went outside to check out the giant toy insects and banged away happily on the percussion instruments.

We got there at 9:30 AM, and he stayed in a state of high excitement the entire time. It wasn’t until 12:30 PM, after a lot of coaxing and repeated reminders, that he finally agreed to head home. Later, I sent some photos to my wife. Looking at the bright, smiling boy on her screen, she sighed, “Seeing this makes me want to go back to my childhood and live Terry’s happy life.”

2. Museum of Flight: Roaring Engines and a Little Regret

Museum of Flight, Boeing Field

Fast forward to this weekend, and the father-son outings continued. Yesterday, our Saturday itinerary was the Museum of Flight. Because the venue is so massive, we mostly just skimmed through, but we still managed to hit all the main areas.

We headed out at 10:30 AM. For lunch, we stopped at a picnic table in a nearby park and brought out the sandwiches my wife had prepared earlier. It was the perfect spot — we could watch real planes roaring overhead as they took off, looking exactly like a dramatic airport scene straight out of a TV show. Terry munched on his sandwich while staring up at the sky, his eyes sparkling with excitement.

Once inside the museum, however, we hit a slight bump. Terry is at an age where he craves hands-on experiences, and right from the start he kept asking to play with the “planes with buttons.” Unfortunately, the Kids’ Flight Zone — the best area for his age — was closed for renovations. Faced with historical exhibits he couldn’t touch, the little guy was understandably a bit disappointed.

We walked through the Apollo exhibit, the Space Gallery, the Aviation Pavilion, and the WWI and WWII aircraft sections. To satisfy his need to touch things, I took him on a scavenger hunt for interactive displays. We finally found a button in the WWII section that let him change radio channels, an interactive 3D screen by the Apollo lunar rover that he could drag and spin, and a pressurized plastic bottle rocket in the Space Gallery. At the Aviation Pavilion, we boarded four different large planes, walking up and down the aisles until, as a dad, my legs felt like lead.

By mid-afternoon, a very tired Terry started getting fussy. He didn’t want to go home and demanded we go to a “park with a slide” — in his mind, our lunch spot didn’t count, because it didn’t have one.

The biggest test came at the exit, when he spotted the souvenir shop and threw a tantrum to go inside. Once in, he locked onto a massive toy rocket, refused to let go, and begged me to buy it. I was hesitant; I’ve always worried that giving in to crying will teach him that tantrums get him what he wants. I stood my ground, said no, and carried him out of the store.

He cried his absolute heart out, tears streaming down his face. Once we got to the car, my resolve wavered a bit, and I called his mom. She listened and said, “Play it by ear, buy it if you think you should.” As I started driving, the exhaustion and the crying caught up to him, and he fell fast asleep in the backseat. When we got home, my wife noted, “It’s rare that we go there — we probably should have just bought it for him.” Looking at a sleeping Terry, I felt a pang of regret. I had tried to stick to my parenting principles, but I ended up leaving a small shadow of regret on an otherwise great day.

3. BrickCon 2026: Compromise and the Joy of Building

BrickCon 2026, Bellevue downtown exhibit hall

Perhaps to make up for yesterday’s regret, I woke up today — Sunday — and saw that the BrickCon 2026 Lego exhibition was happening in downtown Bellevue. Knowing how interested Terry has been in Legos these past few months, I decided on the spot to take him.

Before going, I figured it would just be small, simple builds. But walking in, I was blown away by the sheer scale and adult creativity on display. There were giant mechs, winding train sets, sci-fi characters, intricate spaceships, highly detailed amusement parks, and towering cranes. Terry’s eyes were glued to the models. He desperately wanted to touch them, but seeing the barriers, he knew he wasn’t allowed to, and exercised impressive self-control.

When we finally reached the shopping area, he lit up and eagerly asked me to buy something. Having learned my lesson from the day before, I immediately said yes.

However, this required some strategy. Lego isn’t just a ready-to-play toy, and knowing that my wife and I are already tired enough from daily parenting, I really didn’t want to tackle a massive, multi-hour build. As a compromise, we picked out a relatively simple yacht.

The moment he got his hands on it, Terry clutched the Lego bag like a treasure and, just a few minutes later, announced he was ready to go home. So what I thought would be a long visit ended up lasting only an hour and a half, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM.

Sure enough, as soon as we walked through the door, he refused to eat lunch and pestered his mom to build the boat right that second. Just to get the little guy to eat, my wife and I went into full tag-team mode to assemble it as fast as possible. Even though we somehow ended up with a few extra pieces left over, the yacht looked perfect.

Terry was overjoyed. For the rest of the afternoon, he happily clutched the little boat his parents built for him, refusing to let go even while eating and napping.

4. What These Two Weekends Taught Me

Three outings, three different shapes of the same lesson.

KidsQuest was the easy one: a space designed entirely around what a toddler’s hands want to do. Three hours of pure, unstructured motion, and no negotiation required.

The Museum of Flight was the hard one, and not because of the museum. It was hard because I had a principle — don’t reward tears — and the principle turned out to be a blunt instrument. A rule that is right on the hundredth Tuesday is not automatically right on the one Saturday a year we make that drive. The thing I got wrong wasn’t saying no; it was applying a general policy without checking whether this case was general.

BrickCon was the correction, and the correction had a constraint attached. I said yes — but I said yes to a yacht instead of a cathedral, because the honest limit wasn’t Terry’s patience, it was ours. A compromise made in advance is worth more than a principle defended in a gift shop.

These past two weekends have had their share of laughter, exhaustion, and a tiny bit of regret, but today ended beautifully with that little Lego boat. It is the same feeling I had watching him chase petals under the trees this spring in Appointment with Spring, and the same one behind a decade of national park travels — that the yardsticks of time are no longer measured in my own milestones, but in his.

Watching him sleep so peacefully with his new toy, I realized that accompanying him as he grows — no matter how tiring it gets — is a happiness that simply can’t be replaced.