The week we turned twelve

Fourfold

I keep trying to piece last week back together, and mostly I get a blur. Somehow it’s October, which means only a handful of weeks are left in 2026, which means I need to sit down for a minute.

I spent a lot of last week walking homeowners through slabs at our new supplier. If you read the dispatch from a few weeks back, you know we ended a long relationship there. I expected the new arrangement to feel like starting over. Instead it felt like getting some air. We set the pace of the walk with the homeowner now. We decide how the conversation goes. And the team there is glad to have us. Grateful, even. It’s been a long time since a vendor seemed excited to be working on something with us, and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed that until it showed up.

We also sat for an interview this week. One question was: “What do you think your kids are learning by watching you two own and manage a business?” I’d brought up the kids earlier, and so had Ryan, so we walked right into it. I gave an answer. I’ve been rewriting it in my head ever since.

Home

At the end of the week, our third turned twelve. We’ve always called him our sour patch kid: sweet and sour, all wrapped into one. Which one you get depends on the time of day, where you are, whether he’s eaten and whether he slept. Any parent knows the variables.

He had the kind of week you’d order off a menu. He podiumed at his bike race, a much-needed confidence boost. He had a strong cross country meet on Monday. He finished a book at school. So closing it all out with his birthday felt like a bow on top of the present. We spent time with family, and since he’s a devoted Formula One fan, nearly every gift had something to do with racing.

Which brings me to the part I struggle with. He wants to race. Go-karts first, and then, in his mind, everything after that. That’s a world I know absolutely nothing about. I didn’t grow up around it. I don’t know where you begin, who you call or what you buy first. We’ve done a lot of research, and mostly it tells us that racing is expensive, it eats time and it’s hard to get into. Time is the one thing we already seem to be short on.

Meanwhile he watches his brothers and sister do more traditional activities, the kind with a schedule, a team, a carpool and a booster club. Those get a lot of our support. His thing doesn’t fit the system yet, and sometimes I worry that, to him, it feels like we’re letting him down.

I want to give him the chance to chase it, even if what he learns is that racing isn’t actually it. Maybe it’s working on the cars. Maybe it’s being part of the team in the garage. You don’t find that out from the couch.

What we learned

Back to that interview question. Here’s what I hope they’re learning: you can make your own path. If you’re willing to take the risk and feel unstable for a while (and for the record, we’ve felt unstable for quite a while), it can be deeply rewarding. I don’t just mean financially. I mean the kind of reward where you look back and say: Look where we were. Can you believe we took that leap? Look what we built.

I hope they’re watching us try something completely new, figure out what our real strengths and weaknesses are, and see how they fit together. I hope they see that nothing is too big to at least try.

I grew up in my dad’s restaurant. It was my first job. We all started out washing dishes and bussing tables. You learned the hard things first, and being the owner’s kid didn’t get you onto the grill or out on the floor any faster. You earned your way there. I hope our kids are taking some version of that away: hard work, dedication and follow-through. (Even if we’re not always the best example of follow-through.)

Here’s the part I didn’t say in the interview. We’re teaching our kids they can build their own path, and with our twelve-year-old, in some ways, we’re the thing standing in the middle of his. I used to think balance meant keeping everything upright: the shop, the boards, four kids, four calendars. It turns out it also means deciding whose thing gets the weight this season, and noticing who’s been on the light side of the scale for a while.

I hope he understands that his path is just harder to find than the others’, and not that we didn’t look. I don’t have the answer yet. He’s a year away from thirteen, so I figure I have about a year to find one.