POULSBO — Tucked away in his home within the thick woods, Scott Green doesn’t have a typical work day.

By normal social standards anyway.

As a stay-at-home father, Green says his role is not about gender.

“It’s just role reversal,” he says.

In the traditional family, the kids will run to dad after he comes home from a day at the office. But in this household, the kids run to mom when she comes home, Green says.

This 57 year-old Vietnam War veteran never intended to have children. Growing up in a household with what he calls “a disciplinarian southern military father,” Green didn’t want to raise children the way he was raised while growing up in an Air Force family residence on the East Coast.

But when he married his wife, Meredith, in 1990, she wanted kids.

“I was never anti-kid, I just assumed I wasn’t going to have kids,” Green says. “So we started to try to have our own and dealt with fertility issues. We finally decided it would be a whole lot more productive to spend money on the adoption process than the fertility process.”

Green and his wife went though the detailed procedure with an attorney and social worker to complete a home study (the state certification that confirms parents are fit to adopt) then started advertising and networking to find a match.

They connected with Friends of Adoption in Auburn in 1993 and joined one of their groups, Waiting Is So Hard. WISH is a support group for adopting parents or even those who just want to learn more about the process.

“The thing about the adoption process is that it can be very lengthy,” Green says. “There is a tremendous amount of paperwork and soul searching that goes on before you can even start looking for a match.”

At first, Green and his wife weren’t sure about which parent was going to stay at home. The couple both had stay-at-home mothers and it was important to them to continue the tradition of a stay-at-home parent.

When it came time to decide, Green re-evaluated his career. Self-employed by teaching presentation skills to business men, he realized he loved teaching, but not the schmoozing, lunches and meetings. He told his wife to give him a couple days to end some contracts and he’d stay home.

In 1994, they adopted Jefferson, now eight and four years later, Kader Lee, now four.

Green says it was uncomfortable at first going to the park and being the only man, and at other times. But he got used to it. He is heavily involved with the children’s education including being involved with the Kingston Co-operative Preschool.

When the family moved to the peninsula, Green and his wife realized the value of the group and started their own WISH group as a function of the Kitsap Adoption Group. Although they do not plan to adopt any more children, the couple continues to hold the monthly meetings in their living room, mainly as a community service, as well as being involved in other adoption groups.

While older than the traditional father of young children, Green says he gets the “Oh, is Grandpa out with you today?” line, and he has his standard comeback. But people are impressed when he tells his story.

“I say I’m a stay-at-home dad and they say, ‘Oh yeah, I’d like to do that too,’ but then they say, ‘So, what do you really do?’ And I tell them I stay at home,” he explains. “A lot of people think it’s easy but it’s not. I tell my wife, if someone comes to you wanting a job and they are re-entering from dropping out to have kids and now the kids are in school, I say hire them, because if they can raise kids, they can do anything. It’s a hard job. The hardest job I’ve ever had.”

And in tradition of this weekend, the family is going out on their annual Father’s Day retreat to Fort Flagler with some friends.

The most rewarding thing about being a stay-at-home father?

“Seeing the first smile, the first steps, the first words. Just watching them.”