What Dads Really Want For Father's Day!

Father's Day will be here in a couple of weeks - but do you know what the Dads in your life really want?


I only have two dads left in my life:

• Gus - who is a 45 year old dad with two adult 20-something children 
• Gus' dad - who is a 90 year old dad with one 45 year old child and two adult 20-something grandchildren

There are all sorts of Father's Day gift guides out there, and they have a lot of great ideas - but most are geared towards dads with young children/grandchildren. What do you get dads & grandads who have adult children/grandchildren and already have pretty much everything they want?

I decided to go straight to the source. I picked Gus' brain and asked him :

"If you could have anything (within reason) for Father's Day, what would you want?"

Now, I gotta tell you, he took forever to answer. Maybe it was because he was trying to sleep at the time. Maybe he just couldn't narrow down the choices. Or maybe, which is what I suspect is the truth, he just had a hard time thinking of a gift for himself. He's so used to doing nice things for everyone else, he never does anything nice for himself.

But eventually, I got some answers from him. And he swears that he would love to get these things - which makes me believe that other dads would like them as well...


I also came up with a few ideas of my own, based on things I know Gus likes:

• the cliché watch, because, well, Gus needs a new watch
• iTunes card for apps (because we finally dragged Gus kicking & screaming into the 21st century and made him get an iPhone)
• anything to do with a hobby - Gus likes trains :-)
• framed pics of the kids, no matter their age (Gus loves to have framed pics on his desk at work)
• and a relatively "free" gift would be to make a CD of his favorite songs - you could do a theme, like the beach, summer, etc.