There’s a moment near the end of our first night at Epic Universe that I keep replaying.
We were up high, looking down over the whole park as the Celestial Goodnight show lit the water and the sky — fountains climbing, colors bleeding from blue to violet to gold, the whole place breathing light. And I wasn’t watching the show. I was watching Jayden watch the show. Mouth slightly open. Completely still, which for a ten-year-old is basically a miracle. For about ninety seconds, this kid who’s just starting to have opinions about how uncool his dad is forgot to be anything but amazed.
I’d been chasing that face for months without admitting it to myself.
Because here’s the thing nobody warns you about: the wonder has an expiration date, and it doesn’t send a reminder. Jayden is ten. These days he reaches for my hand in parking lots less than he used to. He’s started prefacing things with “actually,” and correcting me on dinosaurs and Pokémon with the confidence of a tenured professor. He still lights up — but I can feel the dimmer switch, the slow turn toward too-cool. Ten is the last stretch of road where a theme park is unironically, un-self-consciously magic. I didn’t want to miss it. I wanted one more full-blown, all-the-stops trip while the magic was still the real thing, and not something he was performing to make me happy.
So we went to Florida. Epic Universe, the Grand Helios, Disney — the whole big-wonder tour.
But I have to be honest about what this trip was really pushing against, because the honesty is the point.
This has been the year I went all-in on my company. Full bore. The kind of all-in where “just one more thing” becomes a personality, where the laptop comes to the dinner table, where you look up and a whole month has gone by in email. I believe in what I’m building. I also know exactly who quietly got less of me while I built it. He never once complained. That’s almost worse. Kids don’t bill you for the time you miss — they just adjust, silently, to a smaller version of you, and you don’t notice until you catch yourself half-listening to a story about Sonic or Transformers or Mickey shorts for the second time because your head is still in a spreadsheet.
I didn’t want Jayden to get the leftovers version of his dad on this trip. I wanted him to get all of me.
So I made a decision before we ever got on the plane: the phone stays in the bag. Not on silent, not face-down — away. No half-attention, no “give me one sec, buddy,” no scrolling in line. For two weeks, my only job was him. Undivided. That was the whole itinerary as far as I was concerned. The rides were just the setting.
And it turns out being fully present is a skill you get rusty at.
The first day I kept reaching for a phone that wasn’t there — that phantom-limb twitch when there’s a lull. By day three I’d forgotten it existed. We built our own dumb rituals. A running argument about the best land in Super Nintendo World. The Power-Up Bands he took more seriously than I take my actual job. A Gengar he adopted from the hotel claw machine and then narrated the personality of for the rest of the trip. Long, meandering conversations in ride lines about absolutely nothing — which are the conversations you actually remember. At Disney he grabbed my hand without thinking about it, the parking-lot reflex I thought we’d lost, and I made a point of not making a big deal of it so he’d keep doing it.
There was a moment at Donkey Kong Country — late, hot, both of us running on fumes and churros — when Jayden was adamant he didn’t want to get on the ride. Distracted me, old me, would have felt the day slipping and started managing it: fixing it, rebooking it, checking the phone for what we could squeeze in instead. Present me just bailed. We found an umbrella-ed table, split a DK Crush Float (Epic Universe’s version of the Dole Whip), and made up backstories for strangers walking by until he laughed so hard he snorted. Then he decided he wanted to ride Mine Madness and we had A BLAST!!! That non-moment is one of my favorite parts of the whole trip. That’s what presence does. It turns the disappointments into the good part.
None of it was Instagrammable in the way people mean. Don’t get me wrong; I posted the day-by-day on my @thelifeandtimesofjamie Instagram once we got back. It was better than that. It was just us, actually there, the whole time.
Here’s what two weeks of undivided attention gave back to me, which I didn’t expect: it wasn’t only good for him. It reset something in me. I came home and remembered that I am not, in fact, my company. I’m his dad first, and the business is a thing I do so that we get to have days like these — not the other way around. Somewhere in the year I’d let that get flipped. A theme park, of all places, flipped it back.
I also got a clearer look at who Jayden’s becoming, which you can only see when you stop multitasking through it. He’s funny in an innocent and intelligent way now. He notices things. He’s kind to his mom in ways he doesn’t announce. The wonder isn’t gone — it’s just sharing space with a person, a real one, forming right in front of me. That’s its own kind of magic, honestly, and I’d have missed the early edges of it if I’d spent those two weeks answering emails from a bench.
This trip is the reason I restarted this blog, if I’m being straight with you. Not the rides. This — the whole tangle of it. What my life actually means with him in it, next to the company I’m trying to build, next to all the ordinary and not-so-ordinary things that come with being Jamie. Being Jamie, these days, is a lot of things at once: a guy building something and learning, slowly, that ambition and presence aren’t actually enemies — that the whole point of the first is supposed to be the second. A husband. A dad standing in a fountain of light watching his kid be ten for a little while longer. The blog is where I get to hold all of that in one place, instead of letting the busiest version of me win by default. I don’t want these years to just happen to me while I’m busy. I want to notice them out loud. Writing it down is how I make myself pay attention on purpose.
The window’s still open. Not wide — but open. Jayden is ten, and for a little while longer a fountain full of light can still stop him cold. I got one more full-blown trip in before he’s too cool for it. And when he is too cool for it — because that day’s coming, and it should — I’ll have this: two weeks I put the phone in the bag and gave him all of me, and got the best version of myself back in the trade.
Best deal I’ve made all year. And I’ve made a lot of deals.