Spring Break Draws Out Canton's Dads and Sons

For kids, spring break means sleeping in, going to bed late and soaking up all the days have to offer in between. For many working parents, spring break means rearranging schedules to be with the children, or eliciting the help of friends and family – who often have to rearrange their days to help out.

But Chris Tomaszek and Ken Kaminski had it all covered. The two Canton dads opted to take turns with their wives staying home with their kids last week, working from home the days they were out of the office.

On Wednesday, this meant settling into comfy armchairs at with their laptops while their sons “burned off some energy” in the coffee shop’s sprawling play place.

“When the weather is like this,” said Tomaszek, referring to the recent soggy climate, “and the kids are on break, there is not a whole lot they can do.”

Kaminski and his wife Julie have two boys, Conner, 6, and Nolan, who is 4 today. Tomaszek and his wife Michelle also have two sons: Cole, 7, and Luke, 5. The dads said that they had taken the day off work to be with their sons, and that, while the two families were hanging out at Jungle Java together it wasn't planned that way.

The two men – Chris is a database administrator by trade, and Ken a financial analyst – had actually run into one another at Jungle Java that morning out of sheer luck.

“You show up at these places and eventually you’ll run into someone you know,” Kaminski said, going on to explain that the two families had gotten to know one another when their boys were in daycare together. “It’s funny how you get to know people through daycare,” he said.

Both men agreed that while their kids’ school break was a little tough on their own schedules it certainly gave their boys an opportunity to get out of the house after a long winter indoors.

“They didn’t have stuff like this when I was a kid,” said Tomaszek, about Jungle Java’s towering bamboo play fortress, which is a multi-level series of slides and obstacle courses. “All we did was play baseball outside.”

All four of the boys will play baseball this summer.

Kaminski said that Nolan would play T-ball but Conner is excited because this year, he moves up to machine-pitch baseball. Tomaszek said that Cole was going to play in a coach-pitch league and that Luke would play T-ball. 

Both men said that their boys will play in Canton leagues; the games are at various places, including Plymouth’s McClumpha Park and the .