The little things…

Sometimes I think that my daughter teaches me more than I will ever be able to teach her. It’s amazing how she gets such a delight in the little things. She really teaches me to slow down, live in the moment. We were outside today, nothing real big, just running around the yard. She’ll be toddling along and suddenly stop because she sees a small acorn that she needs to inspect. Why this acorn? I don’t know. My front yard is littered with hundreds of them. But for some reason it the sea of grass, weeds and other acorns this one caught her attention. How often do we just blindly meander threw life?

My wife has a little bear that has little sweaters: one for each month. There is also blocks that represent the days. Recently Rachel has found out that these sweaters, which are now more of one of her toys, fit on her arms. She’ll bring one over and hold out her arm and then she’ll go get another. We do thins until she has four or five of these sweaters on her arms. She’ll giggle, run over to her toys and in a few seconds pull them off. A few seconds later here she comes to start the process all over again. I know she’s being silly and, I bet, she does to. She reminds me that it is good to be silly. How often would we say harshly, “Take off those sweaters. They don’t go on your arms!” Maybe they don’t, but it wouldn’t be silly if they did.

Something else she learned recently is the spinning/dizzy effect. Today she stood in the middle of the living room, spun around, fell and then giggled. After she sun around she would try to stay up as long as possible. She did this several times before going onto the next thing. Spinning has to be one of the most basic way to be silly and have fun. It’s free and all you need is yourself. With all the money we’ve spent on toys, she likes to spin. How often to we take the moment to stop and have fun in the simplest of things? Or are we always running off to the next appointment or spending all the money on the latest toys?

I know she’s only two, but she has already taught me a lot about life. It’s little things like these that I try to remember when it’s been a bad day or she’s particularly fussy. So if your days kind of bad, and your child’s being on the bad side, go outside and spin. You’ll have fun.

What’s for dinner?

We needed to run some errands, one of them involved the local mall. I told my wife, Michele, to go do what she needed and Rachel and I would play on the food. Yes, you read that right. The mall set up a little play area for children - good idea. For some odd reason, they made the play area food - not so sure about that idea. The only thing I can think of is that this said play area is near the food court. Here is our day playing on the food and running around the food court.

Mmmmm, watermelon.

I’m not this hungry!

Giddy-up!

This sign that is posted in the play area doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better. Only once a day?

At one point while we were running around the food court, I overheard a lady say to, I assume, her husband, “That little girl, running around all by herself, what a shame.”

Now as I don’t see that I have to be inches from her all the time, I usually follow her at about 5 or 6 paces. This couple walked right between us as I was snapping pictures left and right of my daughter. Did they not see me? Sometimes I just want to ask people,”What is running through your mind?” I have not idea how she did not see me nor understand that I was her father.

Are you my daddy?

The play area is pretty good. The only bad part of it is that if you hit it at the wrong time you have a bunch of 12yo running around with inattentive parents. Now, I’m not a violent person, but if one of those kids hurt my child, I’ll have to knock some sense into the parent. Really it’s not the child’s fault.

What time is it?

The other night I made a bungling error that ended up confusing poor little Rachel and cause a rough night. Routinely, Rachel wakes up in the middle of the night a calls for us, saying, “More.” Most of the time I will get up and get her a drink, which is usually what she wants - sometimes she’s hungry. After the drink or quick snack she’s all right and will fall back to sleep. Now mind you, she is only 20 months old and I feel it’s a little harsh still to let her suffer since I can not yet full explain the situation to her.

Since Michele is the one that has to be up at a specific time, we moved the alarm clock to her side of the bed, so when I wake up in the middle of the night I have no idea what time it is. I always, even if it is close to her normal waking time, try to lay her back down, just to make sure that she has gotten enough sleep and actually wants to get up.

So when I heard her whine more the other night, I knew what needed to be done before I even stepped out of bed. I skipped past her room and grabbed one of the small graham sticks that she likes and took it to her. As I slide into bed, thinking about how much I wanted to fall back to sleep, I heard her again. So I get up and walk into her room.

She was standing up in her crib, leaning against the slats. I walked in, bent down to her and asked, “What do you want, Rachel?”

She looked up at me and in her cutest, pleading voice said, “Up.”

Again, not know what time it was, and thinking I saw it was close to 7:00 am on the microwave clock, I got her up since it was about her normal waking time. She is just like me when she wakes up: very grumpy. The best thing is to just stay away and let her wake up. This usually involves getting her her juice and turning on the TV until she is awake.

I turn on Nickelodeon since most of her favorite shows are on that channel, but, to my surprise, Nick at Nite was still on. Now on the weekdays, I know that there are cartoons this early, but this was Sunday and maybe the lineup is different. I open my notebook to check my mail and notice that my computer’s clock says it’s 1:37 am!

After checking all the other clocks in the various room, I am convinced that it is not quite 2 in the morning. After a short fight, a little fussing and some crying, she was back in bed. She cried for a few minutes before falling back to sleep, during which I felt really bad.