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.

Summer Dispatch 3: Toys

My daughter’s a mom.

For some time now, she’s been calling her favorite stuffed bear her daughter. This summer, she’s taken the conceit to another level. Tuesday, she held a birthday party for her daughter. This included party guests, cake, wrapped up presents (with cards…and gifts from grandpa and grandma), and many other party-related ephemera. The bear got a plate of real food and a cup of water at dinner (though the bear did not eat well, according to my daughter). She held her daughter after dinner and scrolled through her “phone” (an…I kid you not…envelope for a card that was about the size of an iPhone X). When she took a bath, she arranged pajamas for her daughter. Before she went to bed, she read her daughter a bedtime story (a book she had written during her own afternoon playtime).

It got weirder. My daughter announced her marriage to John, her stuffed sloth. When my wife went to the grocery store yesterday, the sloth and bear went too.

I think it’s a phase. John is already being phased out. The bear did not come to the library today. If the bear has a baby…

Summer Dispatch 2 – Audiobooks

My daughter had just finished her fourth audiobook the last time I posted. It is now July 7, and her tally just keeps growing.

The two longest books she’s listened to are the first two volumes in the Harry Potter series: Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. Both are nearly ten hours in the Jim Dale-narrated editions.

She absolutely loved both of them. Sorcerer’s Stone kept her rapt on the way to and from Myrtle Beach. Chamber of Secrets held her attention through the movie debacles last week.

I was so impressed with her audiobook consumption that I purchased her an mp3 player. Now I can load audiobooks more efficiently, and we don’t have to wait for a Playaway version of every book she wants to listen to. A bonus? I can put songs on it as well, and she’s been rocking out to “Can’t Stop the Feeling” (Trolls) and “I Just Want to Celebrate” (Madagascar 2).

Thus far, her favorite new audiobook is Captain Underpants. She loves Dev Kilbey’s Dog Man comic, and when she heard the dramatically rendered audio for Captain Underpants, she flipped. She’s listened to it at least five times. Today at the library, we got the book so she could read along as she listened.

If she starts running around in just her underwear, I’ll know we’ve gone too far.

Summer Dispatcch 1: The Movies

I tried to take my daughter to the movies this summer. Twice I failed. Yesterday, I succeeded.

It’s getting hot here in South Carolina, so daytime romps at the local parks don’t make much sense. We’ve been wearing the local libraries out. A $2 showing of Space Jam on Tuesday was just what the summer doctor ordered.

We showed up, and I immediately knew there was trouble. I didn’t have my credit card with me. A rookie mistake. I had just started using my Apple Pay wallet and figured we would be okay with the state of the movie theater industry. I was wrong. The show times indicated they would also be screening Space Jam the next day. I apologized to my daughter, and we went home.

We showed up early the next day, and there was pandemonium. There were only fifteen minutes until show time, and the power was off in the entire movie theater. It came on two minutes later, but the credit card readers hadn’t fully booted up when the power crashed. The lady in front of me (in a room full of waiting customers) indicated the power had crashed four times in the last thirty minutes. So I made an executive decision. If we left at that moment, we could get to the next closest Regal Theater by 11:35am, just five minutes late. I rushed my daughter to the car and flew up the highway.

The theater was eerily silent when we arrived. It took me just ten seconds to see why. Space Jam had started at 11am at this new theater, rather than at 11:30am. They wouldn’t sell us tickets. We were nearly forty minutes late. No movies again.

So this Tuesday, I tried to head off trouble at the pass. I picked a movie screening at the larger Greenville theater. It was further away but a less likely candidate for power failure. I ordered our tickets through an app. Score. We got to the theater with fifteen minutes to spare and ordered our concessions through the app. The movie, Sing, was heavy on music, and my daughter probably dug it more than she would have dug Space Jam.

“We did it!” my daughter said as she rammed another handful of popcorn into her mouth.

Book Reviews

My daughter completed her fourth audiobook today, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I took the opportunity to ask her to summarize and review each of the four audiobooks she’s completed. Here they are.

Saving Winslow

Summary: A boy saves a donkey.

Review: It was a good book. I liked the donkey, Winslow, especially his little hee-haw.

Little House on the Prairie

Summary: A family traveled to the prairie and built a log house.

Review: It was a good book. Laura and Mary were my favorite parts of the book because they were really playful.

Stuart Little

Summary: A mouse went out and found his missing friend, a bird.

Review: It was a good book. My favorite part was when Stuart wrote a note to Harriett Ames.

A Wrinkle in Time

Summary: Three kids traveled in time in order to rescue their father.

Review: It was a good book. My favorite part was when Meg rescued Charles Wallace with love.

Graduation

My daughter graduated from kindergarten today.

She and roughly 100 other kindergarteners shared what they learned in five areas this morning. She had the privilege of introducing her unit, a parade of animals.

This afternoon, she brought home a couple of certificates and what functions as a kindergarten report card. Her certificates praise her reading skill and emotional balance. My wife and I joked that emotional balance must obviously be a scarce resource because our daughter is all out of it by the time she gets home.

The report listed skills in five categories:

  • Social Skills
  • Communication Skills
  • Self-Management Skills
  • Research Skills
  • Thinking Skills

Every single criterion in every single category got a checkmark. In the report’s words, my daughter is “Exceeding Expectations.”

I’m proud of her (and told her so) for three reasons: she made friends, cemented her love of reading, and demonstrated her academic capability. I pray that God will continue to bless her as we enter the summer.