On the Town

I had a “date night” with my youngest daughter last night. I’m trying to do at least one night out with each of them, exclusively, over the summer. Only problem is that money is so tight it’s hard to do much. I’d like to have done something a little more elaborate, but we’re saving for our vacation, so there ya go.

We went to the dollar show.

The good thing about my youngest is that she doesn’t care about any of that. She just likes hanging out with dad. We watched Kung Fu Panda 2 with her cuddled up on my arm. What could be better than that, right? I got her a popcorn and pop and we had a good time.

We talked about stuff on the way there and the way home. She’s a pretty good conversationalist. She doesn’t just ask a lot of questions, like a lot of kids do. She has ideas and things she likes to talk about. Things she likes. Things she’s done or wants to do.

She thinks she might like to be a singer some day.

In case you don’t know, I have three daughters and no sons. Which is an interesting place to find yourself in life. It is very challenging sometimes. But there is this He Man thing some guys attach to having sons, which I find to be stupid. And not just because I don’t have sons. I’ve always felt that much of what passes for “masculine” in our culture is pretty stupid. What if the truth is that a “real” man knows how to raise daughters? What if the truth is that a “real” man knows how to humble himself and serve? I have daughters and I LOVE having daughters. If I had boys I’d love that too. But, as it stands, I wouldn’t change anything. My daughters are great.

My youngest is one of the most kind, fun loving, enjoyable people you could ever meet. She is a very straightforward person. She makes me proud. Like all my kids do. And if you want to know what kind of humor she has, just look at the picture on the top of the Blog. That’s her.


Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

Losses

 My youngest daughter still has a few words that she gets wrong, and we’ve learned not to make a big deal out of this kind of thing. I actually enjoy it. They get it figured out in the long run. But when they do, when the particulars of childhood are left behind, it makes me sad sometimes.

The current word that I love, that she gets wrong, is when something grosses her out. She says, “That’s exgusting.”

Frankly, I think it’s a better word than the original. It has a little more bite to it.

There are lots of things that you hate to see go with the kids as time passes on. The way you can hold them when they’re really small. The way they mangle certain words and make faces and laugh about certain things. The moments when they first try to be funny. Those cute little baby teeth, all lined up so perfectly straight and even, which get ejected and replaced by over sized, out of place teeth that are way too big for their current faces. And sometimes it seems to take forever for some of the gaps to fill in their smile.

You realize that kids lose so much as time goes by. Sweet things, like the ability to hide under small tables and watch the feet of the grown ups go by or fitting completely in the arms of your mom or dad, wrapped up with your head tucked under, feeling safe. Or the simple joy of playing with an empty card board box or the feeling of running on the grass, barefooted, with the belief that you are the fastest creature on the planet.

Sometimes we also lose trust in the people we look up to at way too young an age, which can be very hard to get back. And sometimes, unfortunately, we lose our innocence.

When I stop to consider all of the loss, all of the things we can lose as we leave childhood behind, frankly it’s kind of...

exgusting.


Matthew 18:2-4




Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

Laugh

My six year old daughter was getting dressed to go play at her grandmother’s house. Normal summer clothes and such. When she finished, she put on this clear, thin, shower cap thing. I have no idea where she got it from, but she was determined to get all of her hair up into it, so I helped her. Finally, I thought to ask...

Me: Why do you want to wear that thing?

Her (very seriously): I want to be the lunch lady.

Slight pause. Then we both laughed hysterically. Which I find myself doing a lot with her. She says things, she seems serious, but then we lock eyes and we realize it’s funny and we laugh. I don’t even know why it was funny. It just was.

Maybe you had to be there.

I don’t laugh as much as I used to, and I miss it. I’ve been made a more serious person by the responsibilities I’ve embraced and the experiences I’ve endured. I’ve seen hard things, witnessed moments of death and the heart breaking struggle of disillusionment and powerlessness in people’s lives. I’ve been victimized by people who dehumanize me for their own selfish reasons while they wallow in self righteousness. I’ve shared in the deep mourning of those who have suffered great loss, and I’ve suffered great loss myself.

Such is life.

But because of all these things, laughter is a greater treasure to me now than it’s ever been before. I really value it. But it’s hard to figure what will bring it on. You never know when it’s going to sneak up on you, and it’s quick to go hide again.

I don’t live for it, but I do hope to make people laugh. On a regular basis. They can laugh with me or even at me (sometimes). Maybe I can help them to laugh at themselves when it’s needed. But I want to laugh with the freedom of a six year old. I want to laugh with others at the nuttiness of life as we try to cope in a broken world. I think that as long as we laugh without arrogance or cruelty, it can be a healing thing.



Psalm 126:2; Ecclesiastes 3:4
Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2010

Fish Stories

When I was really young, maybe 5 or 6 years old, I went fishing with my dad and my brothers and some of my dad’s friends. This was a big deal because they were all heap big fisherman. I can still picture the area we were fishing in my head, but I don’t know where it was. My dad set a rod for me and put it in the water with all the others.

And I waited. That's what fishing is you know. It's the art of waiting.

I played in the trees. I played with bugs. Occasionally I’d go to take my line out of the water and my dad would tell me to leave it alone or I wouldn’t catch anything, pulling the line in and out. Eventually I grew tired of messing with it and went to play in the twilight. As the sun went down, a different set of bugs came out that kept my attention for a while. But when it was good and dark, the grown ups decided it was time to go. So I went to reel in my line, but it didn’t reel in very easy. It seemed to be stuck on something.

It was stuck on a pike fish. It was a big one.

Someone yelled, “Dave’s got a fish!” Dad helped me reel it in, and my parents have a picture somewhere of me and my sister and one of my brothers holding this fish up – if they find it I’ll post it – but that fish was about as tall as I was.

It was a great thing, but let me just say, it sets up some rather high expectations. My life in fishing has been all downhill from there. Nowadays, fish just laugh at me as I drag bait right across their faces.

But then there’s my daughter. She is the proverbial middle child and she is a born fisher-person. Whatever little talent or luck or whatever it was that was displayed that day in my childhood has blossomed in her, and she is not timid about it. She baits the hooks. She takes the fish on and off. She finds a way. She doesn’t let the gooey stuff bother her. And she will fish all day if we let her.

We have been going to a Jellystone campground for years now, and we always have to buy her bait and bring the rods so she can spend hour after hour fishing. She catches blue gill after blue gill, looks at them in a bucket for a few hours, then pours them back in the water for next time. So it was no surprise when she came back to the cabin this last time saying, “Dad! I caught a fish!” Cool. Another fish. I looked in the bucket.

It was a large mouth bass. 13 or 14 inches? Pretty long. She caught it all by herself. Completely. 8 years old. You’ve got to love it.

And we did. For dinner.





Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010

The Wisdom of Elvis

01.19.2010


Hey!

I’m proud to say that my kindergarten daughter is an Elvis fan. She loves Elvis movies, which we watch together, she listens to Elvis music, and she also has an Elvis calender with a different Elvis picture for every day of the year. The fact that she likes Elvis so much shows me I’m doing at least something right as a parent. If I can get my kids to like Drive-In movies from the 50's it’ll be a home run. But there is a fun thing in the Elvis calender. On certain pages it says Thoughts by Elvis, and it has a quote of some kind. And some of the quotes are pretty interesting.

Here’s a thought from Elvis that I especially like...

“Singers come and go, but if you're a good actor, you can last a long time”




Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2010

Daddy Daughter

01.15.2010

Hey!

I have a Daddy Daughter Dance tonight that my oldest daughter can’t go to because she’s too old, even though she’s only eleven. It’s a school thing. She’s not in elementary anymore. Of course, she’s not happy about it, but I tried to make up for it by taking her out last night. We had a great time. Went to see a movie at the dollar show. It’s a dollar fifty now, but we still call it the “dollar show.”

I remember the first of these dances we went to. It was just me and my little Kindergarten daughter who looked absolutely glamorous. She was very elegant. Classy. A kindergarten Audrey Hepburn.

Thing is, she’s more beautiful and elegant now than she’s ever been.


Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2010