Daddy Tree: Tiny Footsteps

Busy and (yawn) tired. It has become quite obvious to me lately that that is the state Willow prefers I be in, busy and (yawn) tired. She doesn't want me rested and alert (or at least coherent). No. She wants me on the move (move, move, move, move, move) and ragged. That's the Daddy she prefers: The Daddy whose world is not at all sharp and in focus; she wants the Daddy whose world is all fuzzy around the edges, a blur. She wants me to be one of those stupid humans in the Liberty Mutual Insurance commercials ("Humans. We mean well, but we're imperfect creatures ... It's amazing we've made it this far.") Here's the commercial: Well, Willow has it her way: I am, indeed, a stupid human. Here's a few examples, just in the last two days, of how she's accomplished the task: I chased her around the house, quite in vain, trying to pull her nightgown off over her head yesterday morning. Exhausting. She dropped her Cheerios, one by one, over ...

I've never really paid attention to the way Cherish puts lotion on, but Willow has. Willow observes everything. After a shower over the weekend, Cherish put lotion on her legs, and wee Willow was there to watch. As Mommy started dressing in the adjacent bedroom, Willow grabbed the bottle of lotion and acted as if she were squeezing lotion on her hands. Then she clapped her hands together, bent over and started rubbing the imaginary lotion up and down her legs. Willow did it over and over, squeezing the lotion on her hands, clapping her hands, bending over and rubbing the stuff up and down her legs. Cherish and I cackled while Willow worked diligently on babying her baby skin. I pointed out to Cherish that Willow was clapping after putting the lotion on her hands. "Do I do that?" Cherish said. "I don't know, but you must." Of course, Cherish is a bit self-conscious about it now, and she claims she paid attention while she put the lotion on her legs t...

Willow was in a bit of a sour mood this morning, so we strapped on our shoes and headed to the backyard. After swinging for a bit, Willow whined and tugged at her constraints. Odd. She'd been swinging only about five minutes (she usually logs about 30 minutes before I pull her kicking and screaming from the swing). She made a beeline for the deck and the water table it holds. The problem was I wanted at least one day off from her getting wet and caked in sand, so I started thinking fast. I needed something to keep her calm but not remove her from the outdoors on such a pretty and cool morning. So I grabbed my bicycle with the child seat fastened to the back and loaded her up. Now I'm not sure how my body is going to treat me the rest of the day because just an hour earlier I returned to the house from a 2-mile run, but for Willow the bike ride was the perfect antidote for a fussy morning. When she spotted the bike, she lifted her arms into a touchdown sign and wanted up in...

Up until now Willow has enjoyed the company of other tots her age only in the sense that where they are is where the fun and the toys are. That is to say she likes the toys and the gyms and the swings and if she has to be around these other toddlers, so be it. That's with kids her own age. She LOVES older kids, but they don't care much for her (other than "she's a baby," and Willow can't keep up with them, though she tries). Her older cousin, Rett, for example, hung the stars and moon in her opinion, so she'll just about do anything he does, including cozying up with him on the chair to watch a movie. And he does like her more than the typical older kid does. But as far as all the toddlers and babies roughly in Willow's age range, she doesn't have much use for them. She's not mean to them. She'll let them take a ball from her hand, for example (as some say, she plays well with others). But I can tell you, most definitely, she just doesn...

I guess it's official. This morning, we witnessed the kiddos hopping on school buses and heading to school. That marks the end of summer, I suppose, and the end of summer seems to come a little earlier every year (even though the actual warmness of the weather keeps creeping later and later; are we going to have winter this year, anyone?). Call me silly, but I like to think of the end of summer as that day on the calendar that falls in the middle of September, after my birthday (my birthday, Sept. 16, is in summer, but it has never, ever felt that way even though I know it's always hot on my birthday). This marks my 39th summer if you count that first one I was born during in 1974, and I'm sure many of them seemed really long or really short depending on how old I was. For me, it seemed like the summers of my childhood lasted FOREVER. Now it seems like they zip by. In a flash. Especially this one. It's been a busy one, filled with lots of travels, family visits and...

Well, here we are, one year later. On Aug. 1, 2011, Willow, Cherish and I took deep breaths and ventured down an unsure road. Aug. 1, 2011, was my first full day on the job as stay-at-home dad. "Unsure road" isn't really a fair way of putting it, though. We were sure about what we wanted to do. We knew the road we wanted to take. But the road was so different from any we had taken in our lives, we weren't sure where we'd end up. We even reserved the possibility we'd have to turn back. We haven't turned back. And we're well on our way. We even found a lot of the happiness we thought we would, and you can't beat that. I don't want to mislead you. All has not been sublime. The road we chose has had some rough patches along the way, but I don't think these rough patches carry any more weight than the ones we might have encountered if we had taken the more traditional route. The roughest patch hasn't been what we expected it would be:...