Daddy-Daughter Day

“We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.” Titus Lucretius

Roo and I had a long overdue date scheduled this week, making the most of a work trip she had to take to Asheville. She had a quick training in the morning after which we planned to see the Biltmore and spoil ourselves with good food and most likely a lot of chocolate. Unfortunately, her training got rescheduled thus she had to go to work in Charlotte instead. I had already taken the day off to spend with Roo so I turned it into Daddy-Daughter day. Of course, the day I am home with A, she decides to sleep late. I was tempted to poke and prod her, cough and make noises to stir her, but she was sleeping so peacefully and beautifully that I just couldn’t wake her. I patiently got caught up on my Bible reading (I’ve been reading the chronological reading plan since early 2012) and waiting for her to wake. As soon as she did, we snapped a few quick ‘good morning’ pics (it took a few takes) to send to Mommy. Next came breakfast where I ate more Cocoa Pebbles than a man my age should probably eat. We watched Mike and Mike on ESPN debate what LeBron James has to do to be on the same level as Michael Jordan. Aubrey laughed as I yelled the answer at the TV (LeBron just needs to win an NCAA title and 5 more NBA championships to be worthy of comparison to MJ). More challenging that scoring 63 points versus the Celtics in a playoff game, I next had to dress Aubrey. I can handle her attire on days when Riley is headed out to run errands and A and I are just lounging around the house but we had big plans today to I needed to dress her up. Her Star Wars tee-shirt was dirty, and I had put all of my eggs in that basket. Thus thirty minutes later, with most of her clothes scattered on the floor, I had her in a pink shirt, jeans, socks, shoes and pig tails. We were out the door and headed out on our date. Our first stop was Target, I had a small list of needs plus we like to just walk around. Aubrey is fascinated by the toy aisles and I like to look at cute clothes that I hope she never grows up to fit into. I like her at this age where she is able to communicate with us via a few simple words and signs. She fits and sits nicely in the shopping cart. She for the most part, eats and sleeps well, without talking back or telling me she met a boy. She doesn’t have a driver’s license or a college she wants to attend. But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. Riley and I have been watching too much Parenthood on Netflix. Back to our day: after Target, Aubrey and I went to the Children’s Museum. Roo signed us up as annual members but I have never been with them before. I didn’t know arts and crafts time was 10:30 on Wednesdays. We got there at 11:30 when it was ending so there were a lot of kids still around for Aubrey to socialize with and then shortly, before noon, the museum emptied out so we had the whole place to ourselves. It was fascinating to watch our little girl explore, and learn and question and laugh and play. I could have stayed there all day…but it was lunch time. I pondered potential lunch spots for us but having been out of the house for a couple hours and just now realizing that I had no idea if there were wipes in the diaper bag, I decided we’d do lunch at home. We shared delicious leftovers from dinner the night before. While A snacked away on some string cheese, I took a quick glance at my personal email. Great news…a London royalty has $500,000 in lottery winnings he’d like to share with me, he just needs some help moving the money through red tape. I’ll be sure to get back to him later, I don’t have my bank account information handy and I made a promise to A (and myself) not to spend a lot of time on my phone today. I was quite proud to see that by lunch time’s end, I had 24 push notifications on my work email app…meaning I had 24 unread work emails that I wouldn’t read for the rest of the day. And the rest of our day didn’t involve much rest, perhaps the excitement of Daddy being home was to blame, but Aubrey refused to nap. So we played with her toys, took in a bit of BabyFirstTV and greeted Mommy at the door when she got home from work in the late afternoon. We had a nice family dinner and since no nap, Aubrey (and Mommy) went to bed early. I ended my day freeing the world of digitally armed angry teenagers by playing a few rounds of Call of Duty. Duty called the next morning and it was back to the office for me, refreshed after a great day at home with my daughter. Epilogue: The next day, Roo and Aubrey took me on a lunch date for Valentine’s Day. Two Valentines are better than one!