"Yippee!"

My wife got mad at me for dumping all the stuff on the beach with her and our three young children and rushing into the ocean.

Geez! I thought.

She should have known better than to marry a surfer.

Of course, I didn’t ask her if she’d seen the waves I’d ridden. I came in and meekly started to help out with the children and then took the kids into the water.

It is a challenge to find the time to surf when you have three children under the age of eight, and it can be agonizing to stay out of the water when the waves are big and the winds perfect. I’ve had a conversation over the phone with a friend in a similar situation, both of us trying to find ways to wriggle out of commitments or find a place to dump the family so that we can race into the ocean. My wife can tell when the fever takes hold of me. I start racing around the house to get all the gear together and the family into the car because I know that the surf will be killer.

Inconsiderate?

Of course, but surfing can do that to you.

It is a fever only mollified by getting into the water. It takes hold and there’s no placation until you’ve had a shot. Then you can come in and do whatever and anything your spouse wants because you’ve had your fill.

Should it be this way?

No, I said to myself the next day. I will do better; I will be a better man. I will restrain the fever. I will help out more and be a good husband and a good father. I will wait before I play. I will put my wife and my three young children first.

Even if the waves are bigger and better today.

I walked slowly down the beach with my wife and children, refusing to look at the waves. I set up the umbrella and the windbreak, lined up the flip-flops and put the cooler under the umbrella. And arranged the beach blanket and the toys.

Then I sat down and looked at the sand dunes.

My wife looked out the surf and then at me and said, “Just naff off, will you?”

I jumped up in a flash, grabbed my board and raced into the surf, the happiest 43 year old on the beach.

Yeah, nothing like a good lie-in

My son is an early riser.

I can hear him turn on the television at the break of dawn.

A deafening thunder rattles me out of sleep. Then I hear him scrambling to find the controls before the volume comes down to a near silence.

I then hear my other two children, eight and three, wander down the stairs. The dog yelps and my wife, lying at my side, groans out just audibly, “The dog wants to go out,” before she pulls the pillow over her head again.

Then I hear my own footsteps going down the stairs and think, we need to get rid of the TV.

Or have the in-laws move in.

My mother-in-law is visiting along with my granny-in-law, and the mornings have been blissful.

Every morning my six-year-old son wakes up his great-granny and they sneak down the stairs, stealthily, with their fingers on their months to say to each other, “Shh…”

No matter what then happens, I ignore it because there’s an adult downstairs and two in back up.

I stay in bed.

And an hour later I walk down the stairs and into the kitchen to gapes and comments about the sleepyhead.

I say heartily and smilingly, “Has anybody fixed me some breakfast?”

Their stern faces do a lot of talking.

So I pour my own coffee.

"Watch out, boys!"

My eldest daughter wants to play football.

So I took the eight year old with her brother, six, to have a go at a summer football clinic in Pinamar, where we are spending the summer on the coast of Argentina.

She put on her Argentina jersey, so did her brother and their younger sister, who is three. She tagged along with her own ball to have a play with daddy while the others trained.

I looked at my eldest daughter, a die-hard fan of Argentina and Carlos Tevez.

She was jumping up and down, warming her legs for the session.

I smiled nervously. I wanted to warn her about the machismo in Argentina, her own country, and that the boys might not want to play with a girl. They may not pass to a girl and they may tackle her just as if she was a boy, and it may hurt.

For all the greatness of Argentine football and players like Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi and Tevez, and for all the fervor of matches between Boca Juniors and River Plate, women are absent from the game. At best they are on the sidelines or simply included as girlfriends or wives.

Do I want my eldest daughter to enter the pitch of this macho sport? To play with the boys?

She likes surfing, skateboarding, playing guitar, reading, art, science, and she wants a cowboy hat for when she learns to ride a horse. That is, a cowgirl hat. All of these are open to boys and girls. Not football in Argentina.

Should I dissuade her?

Should we move to a country where girls play football?

I loved the movie “Bend it Like Beckham,” where girls shined as players, not as counterparts. That’s England, where my daughter has a girl cousin who plays football in a league. American women have whipped ass on the world in football. Germany and Japan, too. Brazil? It puts Argentina to shame, especially with talent like Marta. Argentina? It’s done squat. It doesn’t even have a semi-professional women’s football league.

So I think, I’d better warn her more discouragingly.

“You know,” I start, looking at her in the eyes as she runs in place to warm up, “the boys…”

But she interrupts.

“I know, I know, Dad,” she says. “The boys don’t like to play with the girls. It happens at school and I have to take the ball from them – from the boys, from the boys on the other team. And from the boys on my team because they don’t pass it to me. So I go and I take the ball from them and run it to the goal and shoot. That’s what I do.”

I look at her and smile and say, “Ok, let’s go play.”

"I got it, I got it!"

“The Bad News Bears” was a favorite movie of mine as a kid

I loved it.

I wanted to ride a motorcycle like troublemaker Kelly Leak and take on the whole sixth grade like Tanner.

And it made me play harder at Little League, where once my team went to the championship.

I can’t remember the final result, only a key play. I tagged out a runner to save the moment. I played catcher and the runner was barreling home and the ball was thrown from center field. It bounced and magically landed in my mitt and my mitt, again magically, tagged out the runner, and the ump said, “Out!” Gruffly, and all.

My three kids don’t play baseball. They play soccer, well, football as they call it here in Argentina.

My six-year-old son is the keenest, so far.

He will walk into a game on the corner of the street or at the beach and try to get involved. Sometimes the other kids let him play; sometimes they don’t.

But he goes for it.

So we decided to take him to a football clinic here in Pinamar on the coast of Argentina, where we are spending the summer.

He’s happy, ecstatic… giddy, even, about playing.

On the first day we drove up to the Polideportivo Pinamar, a big public park with sports facilities in the forest behind our house.

The trainer came up to introduce himself and as he and my son and another boy walked through the tunnel under the bleachers to the field, my son said, “I am here because I am good.”

Is he?

I don’t care, really, as long as he is having a good time and learning to play well with other kids. I don’t think I will ever be a pushy parent, unless the kids want me to be. They can play a sport for as long as they wish and if their interests shift then I will play along in the new endeavor.

That’s what happened to me. I went from T-ball to basketball to baseball and soccer (“What’s that, Dad?”) to American football, swimming, skateboarding, cross-country and long-distance running. Sometimes one sport’s season would run into another and we’d be playing two or three sports on any given weekend. My Dad would ferry us three boys around West L.A. to get to games on weekends and to practices in the week. His car put in a lot of miles.

Through it all, though, one sport caught me: surfing. I loved it so much that I wound up dumping most everything else.

A mistake?

Who knows?

What I do know is that surfing took my body places it would never have gone, to islands and frigid waters and to empty bays and waves so big your face was the sight of fear no matter how brave you wanted to appear.

My son still doesn’t excel at football, but he’s trying.

Out on the pitch that first day, he back-kicked the ball with his heel, a perfect pass to another boy.

“Ole,” he said.

Then he was in goal, playing for the blue team. So I walked up to him to show my support. He saw me and told me to go and sit in the dugout, the blue dugout, not the red dugout. I have to go and sit with the other parents, which is where I am supposed to be, he said. In the blue dugout for the blue team, not the red one for the red team, he reminded me. That’s where I am supposed to be.

So I went.

The game progressed and his team scored and my son kept his position in goal. He’s not a badass Kelly Leak from “The Bad News Bears” nor a booger-eating Timmy Lupus. He’s a boy who doesn’t quite gets what is going on all the time. Heck, I don’t. This may be because of his young age or it may be because of his mild autism. Whatever it is, he’s there and that’s what matters. And I’m in the blue dugout, the right dugout. And that makes him happy. He looks over at me and gives me the thumbs up. And as he does the Reds score on him. He doesn’t notice. He’s too busy smiling at me.

I give him the thumbs up back.

Love is in the wind.

As a reporter, I am often on deadline.

And as often my wife will call as I race to get the news out.

She makes requests or insights, and I let them go in one ear and out the other, too busy to take her into account. My attention is on the story and my response into the phone is, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Inconsiderate?

Certainly.

But it happens.

And now the other way round.

My wife has started her own business after eight years of being a full-time mum of our three young children, all under the age of eight. She makes Lazydays Paravientos, or windbreaks, as well as beach mats and other beach gear. She and a partner hit the sewing machines in the morning and then hit the beaches in Pinamar to sell. The windbreaks are gaining attention on the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay (a few are up, and that’s a good start) and she’s got me to drive down to help a buyer put their new purchase up in a few minutes flat. The windbreaks do what they say they do: they shield you from the fast winds that hit these shores.

The trouble, of course, is that the windbreaks are making my life a bit faster.

Gone are any notions of my lazy days as a husband.

I called my wife the other day to tell her something of importance.

“I can’t talk right now,” she said.

Then she was gone.

Payback! It’s a shit, but after years of serving it up, it is well deserved. Not that my thoughts can linger much on the subject. I have to make lunch and do the dishes because my wife has to fill a bunch of orders by the end of the week.

Let’s go, kids. There’s no time to laze about.

"Shall we run? Here, first hold my shoes."

I once won a two-mile race – and then spat up blood.

That was in university.

My competitors congratulated me and said, “You were fast.”

And then they said, “Can we help you?”

They walked with me to the changing room, all 10 or so of them.

It wasn’t a formidable contest. But I won and survived. And kept running and went on to run the L.A. Marathon. But as my easy days of single living turned to that of the breadwinner for a growing family now of five, my running days became less frequent and then were replaced with running after the children.

Now I’m back.

In glory?

Not yet, that’s for sure.

I told my kids about my plans to start running again and showed them my new shoes, bought eight months earlier on a trip to L.A., where I grew up.

“I want to come,” the youngest said.

They all wanted to come. So we went, first on a warm-up jog around the sandy lanes in the forest behind our house in Pinamar on the coast of Argentina. I told them it is good to get warmed up first, to gradually ease into the running, to run a bit further every time, to run a bit faster. To pace yourself.

The youngest, who is three years old, decided to start her running career on my shoulders. So we walked a couple of blocks to the back lanes that run through the deeper parts of the forest.

Then the youngest got down off of my shoulders and said, “Now let’s go running.”

She took off her flip-flops and handed them to me and said, “Let’s go!”

She bolted down the lane and we watched. She raced fast and then stopped, turned around and said, “Come on, Daddy!”

So I ran and tried to catch her. But she took off again, running barefoot down the sandy lane and I had to sprint to catch and pass her and then slow down for her to catch up. And she did – and she kept racing to become in my eyes my very own Zola Budd, the South African racer who mainly competed barefoot, including at a legendary race at Crystal Palace in London on July 13, 1984. I still remember watching the race live on TV, when the presenter called her “the little girl” as she accelerated in the last meters to out-sprint her closest competitor and win. She set a world record for 2,000 meters.

Now I am watching my mini version of the racer, my little girl.

She is the only kid I know with more than 45 pairs of shoes – most of them hand-me downs or inherited – who prefers to run barefoot.

I smiled as she raced past me and put more distance out in front.

Good pace, I thought. She won’t be coughing up blood like me.

So I took off after her – and two my other children did, too, as we started my return to running and their start.

"Nobody is going to catch me now!"

My three children love to play tag. They call it “pica.” That’s what all the kids call it in Spanish here in Argentina, where we live.

It’s a favorite game.

Sometimes it starts a day of play. And at times it’s the fall-game. It’s what the kids and their friends turn to when other games have been exhausted.

But they play with relish.

Off they dart to hide and try to make it back to home base before the “it” can tag them physically or by yelling “pica” first.

It’s quite a challenge.

The “it” often guards home, making it hard to sneak past. The more adventurous “its” try to ferret out the others and tag them physically.

My youngest daughter, who is three, often struggles to keep up with the others, most of whom are five- to nine-year-old friends of her six- and eight-year-old siblings. Sometimes her struggles lead to tears and a face of despair when she is caught time and time again.

But she doesn’t get put off the game. She gets inventive.

She and her six-year-old brother were playing tag after the other kids had gone off to play something else. Her brother kept winning. So the youngest hatched a plan.

Off she darted…

… and back she came with her favorite toy cat.

“I know,” she told her brother on the patio of our house in a coastal pine forest, where we are spending the summer. “The cat will be it.”

Her brother, who was now sitting on his bike, looked a bit perplexed. But he went along with the game.

“Ok,” he said.

The youngest put the cat at home base and dashed off to hide.

Then her brother started to count to 10 – in the voice of a cat.

The youngest hid behind a tree and snuck a peek at home. The cat was looking the other way. So when the counting was over she made a dash for home.

I watched my son. He was about to yell “pica” in the same cat voice to catch her sister before she reached home. But he kept his mouth shut. And the youngest reached home and shouted “PICA” triumphantly.

She smiled broadly and her body quivered with delight as her brother watched on, still slouching on his bike.

Then he resumed his cat voice and said, “Again?”

"I should have worn cutoffs!"

Merry Christmas!

We’re on the coast of Argentina for the summer holidays.

It’s hot and sunny.

This is very much a homecoming for my family. Every summer we come back to our house in a pine forest a few blocks from the beach. This is Pinamar. We lived here for a little over two years, a place that we came to call our pine tree paradise. They were hard but glorious years that suddenly came to a halt as the crappy global economy and the need for better schooling for our children and professional help for our son, who has autism, drove us back to Buenos Aires.

But every year we return to spend our summers here, and we pine for it throughout the year.

The kids start getting the fever in November.

I do too.

In a way, coming here for the summer is like returning to my youth in West L.A.

We open the door and the three kids run off to play in the garden-cum-forest and then climb over the gate – opening it would be much too easy – and run into the sandy street to play soccer and tag, to ride bikes and meet up with other kids from the neighborhood. I can hear them now, hooting and hollering. It is nearly dusk and I am making dinner.

The differences with my youth?

It’s hot at Christmastime, for one thing.

But more so, the big difference is that I am on the other side of things. I am the grownup. They are the kids. I am making dinner. They are out playing – and refusing to come in.

This means I have to face the ordeal – yes, it can be called an ordeal – of walking out to the street and to the gang of kids where I will have to open my mouth and say, “Kids, it’s time for dinner.”

How totally uncool.

I start going out there, and my eldest daughter spies me. The eight year old knows my mission. And she shakes her head and mouths the word “no” before returning to the soccer game with the boys.

I stop on the lawn and think, “Man. If I tell my kids to come in then I will be a totally uncool dad.”

So I watch for a few minutes and wait.

Yes, I wait.

I wait for a neighbor to come out first and call her two boys in.

They go grudgingly.

The game then breaks up, the rest of the kids go home and my two eldest children come running in and climb over the gate and run into the back yard and into the kitchen and to the dining room table, where my wife tells them to wash their hands, and they sigh, and then go and wash their hands, and we sit down.

Then I think, “Yep, now I know why dinner was often cold when we came in from the street when we were kids.”

My daughter is doing swimmingly... Now.

There are many ways to exert money out of parents.

I’ve heard the whining method to the oh-what-we-could-do-with-a-few-dollars approach. You name it. They can often end with petitions of pretty please and sugar on top.

I’m not a tight wad.

I don’t have a wad to be tight about.

That doesn’t matter for my three children. All they know is that there are a few bills in my wallet and coins in my pockets, and for them this means riches worth anything to pursue, no matter the tactic. They are my Ocean’s Three and I am their Las Vegas casino.

I’ve kept them at bay for the most part.

But then came the direct approach.

My eldest daughter walked into my home office, a.k.a. their second playroom, and placed a note on my desk and stood there with her arms crossed and her face stern until I read it.

I picked up the note and read it without looking at her.

"You need to give me $250."

Then I turned to look at her and I saw a face that meant business.

I paid up.

Then I thought, man, she’s only eight. How much will she be demanding at 16?

"You know what? If they just gave us canines a seat at the table we wouldn't have to scrounge for scraps!"

I have a Bernese Mountain Dog.

It is a rare breed anywhere, and more so in Argentina.

So when you come across another you generally stop and let them sniff each other and you exchange a few words with the other owner.

I did last night and the other owner asked how old mine is.

“Four,” I said.

“Yeah, mine’s three,” the man said. Then he asked, “How’s she behaving?”

“Oh, fine… now,” I said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. When he was a puppy, well, he’d eat everything, even the furniture. And my shoes.”

Bernese Mountain Dogs are big and as puppies they have an insatiable appetite.

I’ve always scoffed at the remark, “My dog ate it.” I didn’t grow up with a dog, save Maria, a small black dog. She was gone after a few days.

The experience wasn’t enough to give me a real sense of what it’s like to have a dog. So I would stare in disbelief at the kids who’d come to school and tell the teacher that the dog had eaten their homework. Get lost, I’d think, shaking my head. What a lame excuse.

Now my sympathy is with them.

As a puppy, my dog, aka Four-Ton, was capable of eating the house, if left to it. She tried. Indeed, she got a quarter of the way through a Persian rug while we left her at home to go out for pizza one night. Kids toys? A delicacy. My flip-flops? Yummy! A new magazine delivered under the door. Down the trap. Cake? She’s devoured more than me, and that’s saying a lot. All of this stuff – even plastic bags, bars of soap and plaster walls – are chewed, digested and, well, evacuated. Socks, dish clothes, entire plants. We once tried to discourage her from decimating our garden by putting hot sauce on the leaves and stalks. The hottest sauce we could find. And? She lapped it up and turned to see if we could dab a bit more of that yummy stuff on the next plant over.

You get livid. But what can you do?

Eventually you will live to tell the tale as with this perfect stranger I met on the street.

And the two dogs?

They checked each other out and then slurped up a few pieces of old gum on the sidewalk and together went for a couple of used tissues.