From the Editor-In-Chief

Our high-school-age daughter is blessed with six best girlfriends -- they call themselves the Taquitos (no deep meaning, it’s just because they love the Mexican restaurant in Broad Ripple, La Piedad.) They’re a close-knit group and spend most of their time away from school together.

For our daughter’s 16th birthday this June, my wife and I thought it would be fun to take the kids (meaning our two) away for a few days, at the end of the (long, Covid, etc.) school year, for a little vacation before summer school started. We’d be off to the Ritz-Carlton Fort Lauderdale, for a few days of r and r by the beach. Our kids would be ecstatic when we told them, right? Well, one of them (our son) was. Our daughter, not so much. She really wanted to be with her girlfriends to celebrate her milestone birthday. Suddenly, my wife and I seemed like the world’s worst parents. Our daughter never said that, but her lack of enthusiasm was clear. I thought: are you kidding me? But my wife reminded me how important friends are to teenagers, and putting myself in her shoes, I agreed that maybe I would have felt the same way at her age.

Then, my wife had the idea to let our daughter be with her friends -- in Ft. Lauderdale, as a surprise, complete with a surprise party. She conspired with the girls’ moms to fly the friends down separately and have them arrive at the hotel about the same time we did -- unbeknownst to our daughter, of course. When we arrived, we checked into the hotel and our suite. Not long after, a lovely charcuterie board was delivered, along with a small chocolate cake (a birthday cake of sorts). That gorgeous and delicious cake almost blew the surprise or made us late anyway.

My wife had told our daughter that she and our son were going off to meet her cousins who live nearby and that they’d catch up with us at the pool. What they really did was go down to the lobby, meet the girls, take them out to the pool, and set them up at a cabana. Meanwhile, our daughter ate cake, unaware of the surprise in store. My wife had pink t-shirts printed with each girl’s first name on the back and the number 16, and asked them all to line up, along with our son (also in a shirt), with their backs facing the entrance to the pool, sitting on a couple of chaise lounges. Then, on cue (actually, a few minutes late because the birthday girl didn’t want to leave her cake!), I walked out with our unsuspecting daughter to the sight of her best girlfriends there to celebrate her Sweet 16th. Her expression was priceless -- she was shocked. She put her hands on her face as if to say ‘OMG’ then hugged everyone. She was beyond happy. I surmised we were no longer the world’s worst parents, and I have to say it was gratifying for her mom and me to see how surprised and touched she was.

The partying began and continued all weekend. A highlight was the birthday dinner in a private room at the hotel’s Burlock Coast, complete with special mocktails. We didn’t do much but hang out at the pool and beach all weekend, though my wife and I managed a date one night on the deck at Burlock while the kids wandered over to the open-air beachside Taco Bell next door, apparently one of the high points of their trip (they are teens, after all - plus, as I said, they like Mexican.)

One of the interesting things to us as parents was the dynamic between our son and our daughter’s friends. In the past, our son had been relegated to the role of little brother, but he’s now taller than my wife and me, having grown seven inches the last year alone. His voice is deep now, he’s thin and fit, and (somewhat to our daughter’s chagrin) her girlfriends like him and really enjoy being around him.

At the end of the weekend, we all piled into a very long Uber and made our way to the airport (we all flew back together, which was great fun too). On the flight home, I laughed quietly as my daughter and her friends “decorated” another of the girls who had fallen asleep with mini donuts and crackers up and down her arms and legs. And took pictures and posted them to Snapchat, of course. It’s that kind of sweet, innocent fun that had me not just laughing, but feeling like a grateful father of a happy daughter, who will have fond memories of her 16th birthday, and the Taquitos, for a lifetime.

Jeffrey Cohen jeff@slmag.net