The Circle Game

Depending on when you read this, our daughter will have already marked another anniversary observance of the hour of her birth. Be of good cheer, she's a night owl now, so the chances that she was still up at a little past four this morning when it was exactly the moment to sing a rousing chorus of 'Happy Birthday to Me' are pretty good.

If I'd not retired already, in theory, I'd be up and might have been tempted to serenade her using my Yakky Doodle voice to sing Happy Birthday, except she has her mother's enthusiasm for abrupt starts to the day and would have been in the foulest of moods for hours.

And that won't do, least of all on her birthday. I have a head full of memories and don't always sort wisely or well between what is real and what I remember as real (which causes me trouble and earns me stern looks). My wife has shoeboxes full of pictures of both of our children and in nearly all of them, Michelle is looking directly into the lens, into the eye of the person taking the picture. She has or shows, no fear of the world, another attribute she has from her mother.

Michelle and the love of her life, Kyle, are working on the next chapter of their lives, a chapter that will take them farther away physically than at least one father's heart would like as they, and she, continue to become a part of the bigger world.

She will always be our child-she knows this, we've told her this and she believes us. I'm not sure she's always comfortable with how often one of us (me) sees a four-year-old when she's saying something, though you'd think by now, I'd have abandoned that 'she's my four old' point of view as technically untenable. She should have such luck. Instead, I know that no matter how far or fast she grows and goes, she will always be our little girl. Happy Birthday, itty-bit!

You didn't think I still had this shot

-dad