Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Walt Disney Co., Universal Pictures, Marvel, Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros.), Brian Fluharty/Getty Images, Courtesy of retailers, Twenty Trucks
Jake Lacy has a couple of sporty kids. His two boys — who are 6 and 8 — spent their summer days hiking, swimming, and going to sailing camps and their nights watching (and talking) Boston Red Sox baseball.
Lacy acknowledges that he’s lucky to have even landed his sons in those camps, given the mad scramble parents experience every late winter or early spring to register their kids months ahead of time.
“Five months out, they’re like, ‘Do you want to sign up for the last week of August?’” he says. “It’s always like, ‘I don’t know, I guess?’ and then you end up with a patchwork quilt of events and come June you realize you put them in nature camp four weeks in a row even though they’re going to be burned out on outdoor crafts by week two.”
Because Lacy is an actor, he’s often away for months at a time filming shows like Hulu’s new series Furious, in which he plays the abusive ex-boyfriend of Emmy Rossum’s character, Alice. That means that trying to schedule months in advance, let alone weeks or even days, can feel particularly daunting to him.
“The idea of someone saying, ‘Do you want to put money down for your kids for next summer?’ is always like … I don’t even know what continent I’m going to be on,” he says. “The last couple of jobs where I was gone for a long time, I was just out on my own and that sucked for everyone including my kids but especially my wife, who then just becomes a single parent kind of at the drop of a hat.”
If all goes to plan, Lacy hopes to be able to take his family on a trip somewhere together before the end of summer. But in the meantime, here’s what Lacy and his family are listening to, watching, and playing together at home.
Photo: Brian Fluharty/Getty Images
Both my boys are deep into baseball. We’re like a real Red Sox family, even though when they were little my wife was like, “Let them decide.” We lived in New York at the time but I was like, “No, we can’t do that.” It’s just a nonnegotiable. Like, if they want to pick other teams, if they want to be Knicks fans, Rangers fans, go to town. But you can’t grow up a Sox fan and then be like, ‘And my kids are Yankees fans.’”
We just watched the All Star game the other night and the Home Run Derby the night before that, and we’ll record a game at night so they can put it on in the morning. They’re always amped to give me the blow-by-blow from that game, too.
My kids like fart jokes and poop jokes and butt jokes, and we’ll give over to some of that, but then at some point it’s always like, “That’s enough. There’s got to be some other funny thing in this world than just the fact that Andy has a butt.” There’s never any setup, either. There’s not even a punch line, really.
There’s some song that goes, “Take it easy, do it right,” and my 6-year-old for whatever reason thought it was so funny to say “take it easy” all calm and then scream “DO IT RIGHT!” So it would be calm, then screaming, calm, then screaming, and that went on for like 25 minutes. It was a little like a Tim & Eric bit where, like, the first two times it’s funny, the third time it’s really funny, but then it’s less funny. Then the seventh time it’s actually funnier, and then it’s awful again, but the 19th time it hits even harder. So he’s got that all figured out.
They’re super into Dog Man, Captain Underpants, and Goosebumps. They like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, too. Those are the books that they want to read on their own.
As a family, we’ll read Junie B. Jones, which is a great series, and Geronimo Stilton and the Magic Treehouse books. With my older son, we’ll read the Harry Potter books in a way where we trade off reading pages to one another. We do that with the Benedict Society books, too.
Before bed, we’ll read some Shel Silverstein poems and stuff like that, or find more picture books that they like. There’s one called Our Fort that’s great for bedtime because they have space in them, both visually and narratively. There’s more room for my kids to project themselves into the book or even lay back into it a little bit.
Photo: Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection
We saw Hoppers, which was lovely. At one point, though, Jon Hamm does the voice of the mayor but there’s a robot who pretends to be him and is essentially wearing a mayor-skin suit. His face gets ripped off and the robot has this maniacal skin-suit-face-peeled-off look going on, and it’s a G-rated movie so I remember thinking, Damn, that’s pretty scary.
So later, when my son was describing the movie to my wife he was like “There’s a scary part where this thing happens.” They won’t have nightmares about it but they can identify that something is scary, that they didn’t like it, and then move on from it.
Photo: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
I was born in ’86, so I’m trying to offer them movies that I really liked when I was younger, but also they want to have their own childhood. They don’t need to relive mine. So we watched the newest Superman movie and we’ll see any SpongeBob movie that comes out. We just went and saw the new Minions movie. There’s a lovely theater in Bedford, New York, and we’ll drive over there. It’s small and really well run and has little screens. It feels kind of quaint and small.
They’re still young for these, but I’m excited to be able to show them Ghostbusters, Field of Dreams, Beetlejuice, and E.T. When I was a little kid, like 4, I got dropped off at day care because both my parents were working. I would be so distraught when my mom dropped me off that they would put E.T. on to calm me down every morning, so I’ve watched E.T. probably hundreds and hundreds of times.
Now, having young kids, I don’t think that was the right call. I’m not sure my mom would have been pumped to know, like, “He’s watching E.T. again.”
We got them these little knockoff Game Boys, if — I don’t know — Game Boy was running on DOS or something. They’re just like, “Get the egg into this thing.” We don’t really do screens with them otherwise. They keep telling me that they want a Nintendo Switch and I’ll say, “Yeah, maybe.” I’m just trying to push it off as far as I can.
But we’ll do board games like Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, Monopoly Junior, Clue Junior, or puzzles. When I was a kid, my parents did the same kind of games with me, though, and I was like, “This is a prison.” Now I’m doing the same thing and I’m sure my kids wish they were playing anything else.
Photo: Marvel/Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
My younger son in particular was super into Spider-Man, even though he’d never seen a single Spider-Man movie or read the comic. Then he got really into Minecraft, even though he’s never played Minecraft. We even went and saw the movie, which was awesome but also confusing.
If you go see a sequel to a movie you’ve seen and they’ve designed it so that anyone can jump onboard, you’re like, “That’s a little hacky.” But being on the other side of that is like, “Thank God they explained it, because I don’t know what any of this is or how we got into this world.”
We do a lot of playing outside with them, like playing baseball in the backyard or driveway hockey and driveway basketball. Tennis, swimming … we’re just trying to stay active with them. My hope is that my knees hold up long enough that when my kids are 11 and 12, I can be like, “Let’s go trail run together. Let’s get after it,” or “Let’s do the Pacific Coast Trail. Let’s go do the Long Trail. Let’s do it together before you really don’t want anything to do with me.”
Photo: Twenty Trucks
When my kids were little, we did Twenty Trucks. It’s on YouTube and this guy initially set out to write 20 songs about different trucks, but there’s got to be 100 of them at this point. He low-key crushes these songs, too, like the production quality’s really high.
When the boys were really little, like 2 and 4, they’d go nuts for Twenty Trucks but now in the car it’s a mix. We play a lot of Tom Petty, Dawes, Led Zeppelin, the Dead, and Neil Young. I also feel good because when my kids are wearing those kid Beastie Boys shirts, I’m like, “No, they actually listen to the Beastie Boys. Like, they request ‘Sabotage’ when we drive to the store.”
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