We'll Try This Again Next Year

So, I returned from the store with two presents for the girl. The sick girl. The girl with the runny nose, watery eyes, and hacky cough, who spent her entire Valentine’s Day running around in pink Sponge Bob Square Pants kajamas with one of my socks pulled up high on her right leg.

She ran to the front door after I called to her. I handed her a red, heart shaped, mylar helium balloon.

“Will you be my Valentine?” I asked.

Her face lit up in a huge grin. “Sure!” she squealed in delight.

Then I handed her a box of Brach’s heart-shaped candies, those traditional Valentine’s Day candies with saccharine phrases stamped on them.

“These are for you,” I told her.

“Thanks, dad!” she exclaimed. Then she ran off to play.

Dad successfully gave his daughter her first Valentine’s Day presents.



A short time later the girl returned with box in hand.

“Can you write my name on the box?” she asked.

 “Yes, I can,” I replied. I took a pen and wrote “Captain Chaos” on the “To” line and “Dad” on the “From” line.

She looked at the box with disbelief.

“No, silly!” she explained a moment later. “You don’t write ‘dad’ on the box. You write my last name!”



When mom returned home from work, the girl greeted her in the kitchen with balloon in hand.

“Oh, look at that!” mom exclaimed. “Did your favorite Valentine give you a balloon?”

“No,” the girl replied. “Dad did.”

Ouch.

"Who is your favorite Valentine?" the Boss asked.

"You are!" the girl replied, throwing her arms around her mother in a big hug.

Somehow, this wasn’t working out as I expected.


Later in the evening, after mom took the boys to Karate, the girl and I retired to the basement for some Wii sports before bed.

“Dude, why do you have a hole in your sock?” she asked, wiggling two of her toes through the hole in my sock.

“I don’t know,” I told her. Exactly how do you answer that question? It isn’t like I wanted a hole in my sock.

“Where did you get the balloon?” the Captain continued, waving her red “trophy” in the air. She called it her trophy all night long, although I do not know what she won in order to earn that prize.

“At Dollar General,” I replied.

“At Dollar General?” she repeated. “They had a balloon there for me?”

“Yes, they did,” I answered.

She paused a few seconds.

“Did they have a Slim Jim?”



(Sigh)

We’ll try this again next year.

Day Three

Shortly before the afternoon session started at camp, Captain Chaos and I were alone in the dining hall, sitting on the floor, rolling a kickball back and forth. At one point she pointed to a section of the hall where a large group of cub scouts had been playing checkers the day before.

“I want to go play there!” she announced. “There are boys over there!”

This girl scares me. I’ve known for years that I am the father of a girl, but I never expected such enthusiasm for boys at such a young age.

**

Currently, there are fourteen children under the age of seven and three teenagers trying to decide whether or not to believe that I do not have a belly button. I may or may not reveal the truth before camp ends on Friday. At the height of their disbelief I asked Captain Chaos, “Does Daddy have a belly button?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Nope!”

They couldn’t decide whether to believe that she was telling the truth or just well coached for a scam.

**

I repaired four children at camp today. That’s six for the week. As soon as I cleaned one cut knee another kid came up complaining that she had slipped on the flagstone and was bleeding. After watching me clean up all those children, Captain Chaos noticed a small red spot on my lower right leg that had been a bug bite that I scratched one too many times. She unzipped my emergency kit, pulled out my cotton balls, peroxide, Neosporin and Band-Aids, and started to clean my leg. She washed the cut, put a dab of goo on the spot, and perfectly placed the sticky part of a Band-Aid over the sore. She was sweet and tender and I’m grateful that Band-Aides don’t stick to Neosporin.

The Heart is Where We Feel Pain

I’m fighting every protective, parental instinct in my body this Monday morning. I’m fighting the urge to grab my daughter and hold her close and play with her all day long while hoping that she does not remember that today is the day for her preschool class field trip to the Topeka Zoo. Topeka. As in Kansas. We happen to live in a zoo anomaly here in Apathy, Kansas. We have two zoos that we can visit as long as we are ready to drive either an hour to the east to the Kansas City Zoo or an hour to the west to the Topeka Zoo. The Topeka Zoo is a little smaller and easier to navigate, so that is the zoo of choice for Apathy Elementary School. Well, that and the fact that they don’t have to cross state lines or drive through downtown Kansas City.

We chose to keep Captain Chaos back from this field trip last year. We did it to protect her from herself. We kept her home for the sanity of her preschool teacher and the paras who assist the class. There’s the animals to think about, too. Lions run for cover when the Captain approaches. The decision wasn’t met with enthusiasm from the staff last year, but we were vindicated when one of the paras approached me after school the next day and thanked me for keeping Miss Chaos at home. It was a bit stressful that day, and throwing Chaos into the mix would have made it more challenging.

A year has passed. Everyone is in agreement that holding Captain Chaos back from entering kindergarten last fall was the correct decision. A second year with this same preschool team has done wonders for the Captain. This second year in preschool gave her a second opportunity to join her fellow short-busers on the annual zoo field trip. And there really is no reason to keep her home this year. As I type, they are loading onto buses for the start of their journey. For the Captain, the bus might be more exciting than the animals.

I lost sleep over this one. I awoke at four a.m. and haven’t been back to sleep since then. This is my daughter. If it were one of my boys going on this trip I would not be this concerned. I guess I’m old school where my daughter is concerned. This is my one and only daughter. This is my little girl and my youngest child. The last six years have been quite the adventure with this cardiac kid, and learning to let go, even if for just one day, is proving to be quite the challenge. My head tells me that everything will be alright. My heart tells me to protect her at all costs. I listened to my head, but the heart is where we feel pain.

Happy 6th Birthday, Captain Chaos!

This photo was taken May 8, 2004. The baby in the picture is Captain Chaos, 4 days old.

The wonderful lady holding her was our good friend Captain Chaos, the lady our daughter was named after.

 This is a picture taken June 4, 2004 on the Captain's 1 month birthday.

Since that day, we've had many adorable pictures taken of her. Here are a couple of her first year.

Today we celebrate the Captain's birthday. We have many things to be grateful for when it comes to our only girl. We love her for her many fine qualities. Below is a list of some of those things, along with photos of her wonderful, blessed 6 years with us.

We love you for:

Your playfulness

Your beauty

Your strength in the face of a fight

Your love of the outdoors

Your smile

Your laughter

Your class

Your ability to sleep through most anything

Your cheery disposition in the wee hours of the morning

Your loving heart

Your love of anything Mickey

(Seriously, she loves Mickey)

(Reaaaaaallllllllly loves Mickey)

The way you march to the beat of your own drum

Your innocence

Your curiosity and wonder of the big world around you

Your unparalleled bed-head

The way you make us smile

Your weird love of chickens

Your ability to call it like it is

Your beautiful eyes

Your sense of humor

Your perfect aim

Your addiction to adrenaline

Your girlishness

Your modesty

Your love of Slim Jims and Funyuns.

So today we wish you a very Happy 6th Birthday, Captain Chaos.

Thank you for all the joy you bring to our lives.

That and all the entertainment.

Five Small Words That Make My Heart Skip A Beat

So, the General and I were sitting at the kitchen table, working on math, when we heard Captain Chaos call out, “Hey, look at me, boys!” This phrase scares the hell out of me. It isn’t the first time she’s used it, and I always pray that she will stop saying it by the time she reaches age 14. Both the General and I looked up from our work and saw the girl standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. The rest is hard to describe. She was wearing her shirt and one great big proud smile. From the waist down she was wearing a pair of her mother’s underwear. “Wearing” is not quite the right word. She was standing in a pair of her mother’s underwear, pulling the waistband up around her chin. She probably could have pulled them over her head if she wanted to. This is not a cheap shot on my wife, either. My wife could be a size one and the peanut who is my daughter would still swim in her clothes. Some kids try to walk around in their parent’s shoes. My daughter? Well, she goes right for the drawers.

On Moving Big Rocks

The Boss and I were sitting on the couch in the basement watching Two and a Half Men, a show that is wrong for far too many reasons to list here but extremely funny none-the-less, when I heard the unmistakable sounds of a child crying upstairs. I ran up the stairs and found Captain Chaos standing in front of the gate that keeps the Coon Hound in the kitchen. Her hair was teased out in a wild, bed-head frizz and her eyes were red from crying. The little girl stuck her arms in the air, waiting for daddy to pick her up and hold her and comfort her. I did, asking if she was okay and soothing her imaginary ailments as she wrapped her arms around my neck and buried her face in my shoulder. I decided that the quickest and easiest method of getting her back to sleep was to plop her in my bed, on my pillow, and allow her to fall back asleep under daddy's blanket. I'd move her back to her bed when the Boss and I were finished watching TV. As I plunked her in bed and covered her up with my blanket, the Captain rolled over to face me. Her eyes were closed, and she flashed her trademark tight-lipped, wide, self-satisfied grin.

"Oh, she's good!" I thought to myself. "I've been had." She got exactly what she wanted, and I didn't see it coming.

The thought has occurred to me on more than one occasion that somewhere in this wide, wide world is a young, innocent boy who is completely clueless about his future. He is going to grow up and meet a cute, happy, freckle-faced girl. She'll be a free spirit. They'll become friends. He is going to fall in love with her and decide to spend his life with her. He'll ask for her hand in marriage and she will accept. Before he knows it he will realize that he is hanging on for dear life and enjoying every minute of it because she will delightfully keep him on his toes, never knowing what is coming next, but unable to say no to the tight-lipped, self-assured beaming smile that comes his way after she walks past the light switch, climbs in to bed next to him where he has been waiting, and asks him to turn off the light. Or get her a glass of water. Or her pillow that she left on the couch. She'll ask him to move the 600 pound red rock in front of their old house across state lines because she wants it in front of her new house, too. He will do it. Unlike Ogden Nash's Song To Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children, where he laments about the boy who will want to marry his daughter Jill, I'm thinking of writing the Song To Be Sung To the Unsuspecting Fool Lad Who Marries the Captain. The world should be warned.

The Boss laughed when I told her what had happened. When I shared my thoughts on the future Mr. Captain, she said, "Yeah, they said the same thing about me."

I had to laugh. I'm that boy. I'm the one who gets up and turns off the light. Or gets the glass of water. Or retrieves the forgotten pillow. I moved the 600 pound red rock across state lines because the Boss wanted it in front of our new house, and when my mother-in-law asked me (with more than a little incredulity) why I did it, all I could say was, "I love your daughter."

Yes, there is a little boy somewhere in this world who has no clue what is in store for him. I bet I'll share a few moments with him like my father-in-law has shared with me. They are quiet moments when the Boss' name comes up in conversation and he just shakes his head with a smile. He knows. He married her mother. It's a generational thing. And where the Captain is concerned, I'm just the training ground. I'm the person on whom she perfects big doe eyes and the sing-song, "Daaadddy?" that will become a sing-song "Hooooonnney?" in the future. And a big rock will be moved.

I'm in a privileged position.

And I wouldn't trade it for the world.