Celebrating my baby girl—like every other day
I have about 600 days before she's off to college; I'm making them all count.
“This family would have missed out on something special without having you in it.”
I said the words above to my baby girl when she was four years of age. She was sprawled across the ottoman, at our home in Windermere, Fla., as I held her down and tickled her into submission. It was our thing. While my eldest has always been my nerdy, cerebral kid, my baby girl has, since day one, occupied the fun, funny, tough, bright, techie, find-a-way spirit that she’s become famous for in our family.
I’ve never met a more selfless, charming, hard-working person.
Let’s be clear, however, because she IS a teenager, a common refrain I share goes as follows:
“Arden is 90% the most amazing kid I’ve ever met; then there is the 10% that makes me want to WWE chokeslam her. Fact!
So, yes, we had a blast celebrating her birthday last week and weekend, includling dinner at our family favorite, Truluck’s
600 days and counting
One of the best decisions I’ve made in recent memory was taking account of how much time I have with the girls before they’re both in college. It helped order my steps and lean further into “keeping the main thing the main thing.” (I’ve shared this philosophy with many others, too, some of whom have adopted a smiliar stance regarding managing their time.)
As I’m wont to say, “When my girls are off to college, me, Rachel, and Coco will be on a lake, in the woods or traveling.” So, I’m going all in now on redoubling my efforts to ensure that we’ve set them up for success.
A Christmas surprise
For Christmas this year, my baby girl prepared a gift that gave me all the feels: A picture book of images of me and her through the years—from me taking her to gymnastics at two years of age, then later at 7 years of age, to us at softball practice, at the beach, riding bikes, smooching, and on and on.
She’s always been a super thoughtful kid, but this one surprised me, in part because of my “no gifts rule” for me. I tell the girls, “Don’t ever buy me a gift because y’all are the only gift I need.”
But I couldn’t protest about the book, which, given the time it took her to round up and print images, was an incredibly thoughtful gesture.
Dad’s favorite gift to my baby girl
When my youngest turned 6, I started giving her powerpoints of images of our time together. This sufficed as a replacement for the scrabooking my wife had done for my oldest. Plus, with the advent of the iPhone the year she was born, I had plenty of images to compile.
Usually, the Sunday night following her birthday, we’d pile into my office and scroll through the PPT, with her in my lap laughing. I continued with the PPTs for her milestone birthdays (10, 12, etc.) but hadn’t done one in a few years, in part because my Google Photos is linked to her account, and the algorithm sends her all the images of her that I take.
This year, though, I went back to the archives, so to speak, pulling together images of me and her from the family photobooks. While I interespersed images from recent years that she’s familiar with, I most included photos she’d never seen. Replete with funny, apropos captions. Then I added audio from Alicia Keys’ “This Girl is on Fire.”
She loved it.
