Own the Moment!
It’s Better than Seizing the Day…
My oldest child just turned twelve last month. I was still pretty young when she was born, young enough to think of myself as a ‘cool’ dad. We were buddies when she was a baby. Before she could talk, I would play guitar and she would sit on the couch or in the window and sing gibberish. She would pretend to be an airplane while I ran across the beach holding her in the air so we could scare the seagulls. I used to take her out early for café breakfasts. She was less than a year old the first time she ate my whole breakfast. I had to start ordering two after that. When she was just learning to talk, we would have early morning tea parties on the balcony overlooking the street. She learned most of her first words that way: bird, car, plane, tree, cup of tea (which she pronounced as ‘tuppa-tee’).
When she got a bit older and there were other kids to make claims on my time, I started to realise I was losing her. To counter the distance that I felt slowly growing between us, we started a tradition that we called ‘secret mission’. Ever the early riser, she might come into my room at 6am on a Saturday morning and whisper in my ear: “Secret mission?” I would sigh and nod, “Yep, ok, I’m coming.” We would sneak out of the house, careful not to wake anyone, and go to her favourite patisserie. Just personally, I don’t think there’s any better way to bond with a girl…
