Winter Dispatch 1: Basketball Jones

My daughter has been bitten by the basketball bug.

Last week, she attended a girls’ middle school basketball game. The gym was beautiful. The play was not. My daughter didn’t care. The next day, she said she had to go to practice, loaded up her backpack, ran out to our back deck with a bouncy ball she got from the Dollar Tree, and pounded the rock for an hour.

This weekend, I took her to see my university’s women’s team play a game. We were on the front row at center court, and she was riveted. She’s been dribbling around our kitchen/family room, giving us scouting reports for her team (who can make shots, pass well, etc.), and generally behaving as though this is how she plans to spend any and all of her free time.

The basketball bug took a chomp out of me when I was younger than her. I’m still recovering.

We’ll see what her prognosis is in a week.

Fall Dispatch 3: Learning to Ride

When we got home from the state fair (the subject of a forthcoming dispatch), a bike was sitting in our driveway. My wife’s cousin had gotten it for our daughter. It looked cool. She was excited.

There was just one problem: my daughter didn’t know how to ride a bike without training wheels.

So she and I headed out on a Sunday night to start work.

It had been a year since she’d ridden her bike with training wheels. To jump back in with a brand new (bigger) bike was a tall task.

The entire enterprise was a practice in parenting as much as it was biking.

We worked on it for twenty minutes a piece on Sunday and Monday. She hadn’t had a breakthrough yet, and she was scared of getting hurt. I knew I had to do something different. My daughter already had a bike her size, and thanks to the kindness of a local bike shop proprietor who filled the tires for free, we went out Tuesday night looking for progress.

After fifteen minutes, she was in tears and ready to go. I asked her to try for just five more minutes. Before we left, I had a video of her riding for ten seconds on her own. She watched the video over and over on our way home. When it was time to head back out the next night, she watched it again and again to get herself primed.

This time, she put it all together, and this time, my video captured forty-five seconds of pure pedaling, turning, and braking confidence.

To say I was proud of her would be an understatement. To say she was proud of herself would be an even greater understatement.

It was the educational and familial highlight of our week.

Fall Dispatch 2: Halloween

Halloween has come and gone. What a difference a year makes.

For the past several years, our daughter dressed up as a kind of cat: a tiger, an American short hair, etc. It was fairly easy. Face paint? Sure. But it was pretty low maintenance.

This year, she only had one costume in mind: Harry Potter.

Since she started reading the Potter books in the summer, she’s been obsessed. We’ve gone through five of them (she just reread Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), and her passion shows no sign of abating.

Every burgeoning wizard needs gear: a cloak (Amazon!), a Gryffindor scarf (birthday present!), Potter-esque glasses (Target!), and a wand (an adapted pick-up-sticks game piece!). And don’t forget the forehead scar! My wife had all of this on lockdown.

My daughter got to wear the costume three times, and with her missing front teeth and her hair tied back into a bun (she wanted to be Harry, not Hermione), she looked really, really cute.

We’ll see if she still wants to be Harry when the next Halloween rolls around.

Fall Dispatch 1: School Pics

My daughter brought home her first-grade pictures yesterday. They already seem like museum pieces.

Comparing her kindergarten pic and this first-grade one clarifies how much she’d grown. Her face is fuller and her smile more mature. She’s not a little kid anymore, and her pictures document that transformation.

But even over the past month, my daughter’s appearance has changed. She’s lost her two front teeth in as many weeks, and neither replacement has emerged.

I don’t know how long this look will last. The school pics captured my daughter’s look at the end of whatever phase she was in before. Now she’s in between.

Birthday Party – By the Numbers

7 – the number of years my daughter’s been alive

4 – the number of days after my daughter’s actual birthday when we held her birthday party

24 – people who attended said party, including the guest of honor and her parents (i.e. us)

7 – the number of Harry Potter books my daughter now owns as a result of generous family members

4 – the number of snack bowls available at the party, each named after a house of Hogwarts (e.g., Gryffindor grapes)

0 – slices of Raspberry Elegance cake from Publix remaining after the party

10 – the number of cupcakes left, since even the kids wanted the scrumptious cake

0 – minutes of Quidditch played since it was raining heavily outside

30 – minutes spent on the back porch maneuvering an outdoor remote control car in, shall we say, adverse conditions

2.5 – number of hours my daughter spent with her best friend from kindergarten who is in a different first-grade class

3 – number of half-chewed and spit-out Bernie Botts’ Every Flavour Beans found in my daughter’s sink after the party was over

1 – very happy birthday girl

2 – tired but relieved parents

The Cloud

I gave thanks for my daughter’s upcoming birthday in church yesterday during our congregational prayer time. Everyone in the congregation applauded.

I was sitting in the choir pews on the platform. My daughter was sitting in front of me.

With our former pastor’s daughter gone, my daughter is often the youngest person in the congregation by a decade and a half. She is our lone acolyte. An audience of one each Sunday with the Children’s Church leader, she’s gotten used to speaking and singing in front of the congregation. She’s everyone’s daughter and granddaughter.

I am sure we will have to think about where to connect her to peer faith groups as she ages.

Right now, I marvel at the grace she receives every week from a group of people who have known her mama and grandpa for most of their lives.

To sit surrounded by that cloud of witnesses each Sunday gives me a tangible picture of what it means to be part of God’s family. The fact that it’s my daughter receiving it takes my breath away.

Into the Labyrinth

Today, my daughter entered the labyrinthine world of Dairy Cow Showing, but she wasn’t entering alone.

My wife has blazed a trail for her. So significant is dairy showmanship to my wife’s identity that Alex Trebek asked her about it on Jeopardy in the show’s obligatory get-to-know-the-contestant segment.

A cloud of family witnesses surrounded my daughter for her inaugural presentation. Her aunts, uncles, grandfather, and parents were sitting ringside. Moreover, her beloved oldest cousin walked beside her as she led the cow around.

The type of cow? Jersey. The number of kids competing in this showmanship category? Three. My daughter’s final standing? Third.

“I’m just real proud of this exceptional group of dairy youth,” said the judge. The judge liked the word “exceptional,” though he robbed the word of its power by using it so much.

He did say one thing that stuck with my daughter. “If I judge you again, I’d love to see you lead the cow on your own.”

From your lips to God’s ears, sir.

You have to start somewhere.

Back to School

My daughter is back at school. Give thanks. Send up prayers.

We were away for the four days leading up to the semester, which meant no parent/teacher conferences. All that we knew was that my daughter’s best friend from kindergarten would not be in her class. I feared the early morning battles, the struggle to get her in the car each day, one spent without the company of her best friend.

I do not know my daughter very well.

She bounded out to the car and announced as she opened the door, “Best. First. Day. Ever!”

Why? Props to carpooling with her older cousin, who she adores. Props to a great teacher. Props to a boy she likes chasing around at recess (but she doesn’t like him, folks. C’mon now!). Props to her loving learning and showing what she’s learned.

Tuesday morning, she was raring to go. Now, if we can just cast the unclean spirit out of her bed hair, we’ll be making progress.

Summer Dispatch 5 – Literary Heroes

My daughter finished the third book of the Harry Potter series, The Prisoner of Azkaban, yesterday, and she proceeded to start it all over again. In a way that hasn’t been true with the first two books, my daughter has started identifying with Hermione Grainger. I gotta tell you, it’s a great thing to see.

In this third book in the series, Hermione gets a pet cat. For our daughter, the cat lover, this sealed the deal. Hermione spends a lot of this book studying, so while she stayed in her room yesterday, my daughter put together a backpack worth of “textbooks” and even completed some “homework” (complete with the necessary words and phrases to combat her greatest fears—spiders). She did the same this morning as she relistened to the book.

To be clear, it’s Saturday morning in July during summer break, and my daughter is willingly doing math homework as part of a game while she relistens to an 11.5 hour book.

We’ll take it.

Summer Dispatch 4: Art Camp

Last year, my daughter attended a three-week day camp I held at our church. She was the youngest kid in the crew, but it was small and she got on well enough. Her dad was there the entire time, after all!

This year, we signed her up for a one-week art camp in a nearby city. I was a bit anxious. My daughter certainly wouldn’t know anyone there. There would be not just music or painting, but dance, theater, and sculpture. How would she respond?

Like gangbusters.

We never had to twist her arm to go (despite the 40 minute car ride there), and she bounded out to us each day at noon excited from what she had accomplished that day.

My daughter is more adventurous and resilient than I give her credit for.