Sitting at the dinner table, the three of us hear a familiar clink in the driveway, and I can see smiles creep across the girls’ faces, sparkles arriving in their eyes, and then we see him, the hero and his trusty steed, or rather, my husband, wheeling his bike into the shed. They begin a chant, squealing and giggling, “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!” You’d think the star player were entering the stadium. And to us: he is. Some days he rides in like the cavalry, saving me from a day gone horribly wrong and saving my children from a mama at her wits end. But even on a day gone right, things are still just infinitely better when he’s home. Continue reading “happy father’s day”
First of all, since it’s Father’s Day, I thought I’d take the opportunity to plug one of my favorite blogs, which happens
Image via Google's LIFE photo archive.
to be written by a dad, and which I think will be turning into a book at some point in the near future: 1001 Rules for my Unborn Son. Though I will say that I think most of the rules are equally appropriate for girls as well. Which brings me to MY dad.
My dad has 3 girls. Sometimes when a guy will mention that he has three daughters, other men will express sympathy that this poor man did not get to have a son. And while my dad has, at times, loved to crack jokes about being surrounded by women, noting that even all of our pets have been girls, he truly loves it. I know this, because my parents adopted their third daughter only a couple of years ago, so I’ve had the benefit of watching him with her, and seeing him as a dad with his daughter through the lenses of my adult eyes, filtered by my 24 years of experience as his daughter. He loves being our daddy. Every giggle or squeal that he can get out of us warms his heart. He truly lives to make us smile.
Now perhaps it’s because my dad’s mostly a cerebral guy, not into male jock stuff, but we weren’t particularly raised with ideas of “boy stuff” and “girl stuff” or the idea that my dad would have any more fun with us if we had been boys. He took us on car trips to dig up crystals and gave us long lectures on rock types and geological formations, and the way mountains are made. It would not at all be unusual for him to pull the car over to look at the strata of a particularly interesting sedimentary rock formation. He forced us to dig in the garden and pull weeds and harvest tomatoes, chores I often hated, but appreciate now that I’m an adult, trying to grow some of my own food. He created elaborate treasure hunts for us to follow, riddled clue by clue, until we got to the big treasure at the end. He also created elaborate Halloween parties, with dry ice in cauldrons and his entire bug collection on display on a kitchen table, and all sorts of other delights that scared me so bad I wouldn’t go in our basement for several years without trepidation, but which were the talk of our friends well into high school. Continue reading “happy father’s day”
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 