sgsmitty64 - btw, your comment really annoyed me as you either didn't look very closely at my schedule or you have an exagerated sense of how many hours parents spend with their kids.
Even on my recent hectic schedule, your'e still looking at 2 to 3 hours per day of playing around with the kids.
In my experience, the typical working dad sees their kid, at best, for a couple hours in the evening. They leave for work before the kids are up/at school and go to work. They get home at say 5:30pm. They have, at best, a couple hours per day to spend with the kids which, from my observation, people rarely do. I see lots of dads come home, eat dinner, watch TV, visit with their kid maybe an hour or so per night.
Whereas in my case, At 10am from 11am I have time to play around with my kid both inside and outside and then when I'm working from home which varies (sometimes I'm home at 4pm sometimes I'm home at 9pm the location of where I work varies) I'm amongst my kids a lot who I play with and see a lot. Plus my kids come to the office a lot (such as today).
So the whole "Cats in the cradle....." was really uncalled for IMO.
The point of the schedule which seems to have been lost is that when you're runnign a company, your schedule is 24 hour basically. That is, you're always on call doing something. But it's far lower impact. I'd rather be making comptuer games and desktop enhancements than working in factory or in a political-intensive office environment.
And the money I do make allows my wife and kids and I to spend a lot more time together. Because I earn more, I can pay someone else for home improvement/repair/maint. So I'm not blowing 2 hours a week on law maintainence. I don't lose weekends fixing up the basement or fixing dry wall or building a deck or whatever. Instead, I take my kids on "adventures" (essentially long walks in the woods) or to the comic book store or play laser tag or squirt guns or whatever.
A lot of the time most working dads