One of my favorite parts of being a dad is enjoying the late afternoon sun with my daughter. My wife and I welcomed our second kid, a boy, into the world in late March and so our 2-year-old daughter has been, for the first time in her life, experiencing a shortage of attention from the two most important people in her life as we tend to the new baby’s needs.
This has led to a whole new range and variety of big 2-year-old emotions from her — both positive and negative. As countless families have experienced before us and have told us, this is both a good thing and “is what it is.”
To help Mama focus on the baby and all the other countless things she has going on, I usually spend most of the time in my afternoons after work with our daughter and we typically stick to a pretty simple script: We walk around our house, water plants, do various menial tasks like sweep leaves from the porch or look for bugs. Eventually, I’ll end up rocking in one of our porch chairs while she gathers little pebbles along our driveway.
Those few quick minutes where I rock and she finds her pebbles are some of the sweetest minutes of my day. Around 5 p.m., the sun fades behind the trees to the left of our front porch and so for a little bit we’re shaded well enough to enjoy the warmth of the day and the coolness from the shade. As is less common in our world today, for these few minutes, life is quiet. A good quiet, with just the right amount of sound from the breeze, my little girl making interesting sounds as she sees new things, birds and airplanes overhead.
It recently hit me just how amazing it is that this little 2-year-old, who can hardly walk and barely talk, is already wired with a concrete ability to give and receive love. After finding a few (maybe two or three) small pebbles, she hobbles (inefficiently) over to me, places them in my hand, says “thank-oo–daddy,” as if I’m giving something to her and then with a toothy smile and her blonde hair half covering her blue eyes, pitter-patters back to find more.
Who is this little thing my wife and I have brought into the world? How is it that she understands contentment seemingly in ways that I might always be striving for?
Somehow, the pitiful, insignificant little pebbles she gives me somehow are enough to make me forget about whatever problems seem to be most pressing and for a short few minutes, we’re just there together — content. So, when they say kids are a gift, maybe this is a glimpse into that age-old truth. Who knows?
As her Dad, I know she doesn’t know much of anything, but maybe I was naïve to think that I would be the one to teach her all she needs before entering the world. It’s sometime after these little moments when I realize that I may be learning more from her than I ever thought I would. And now I realize we’re both certain of a few things: She loves Mommy and Daddy, and Mommy and Daddy love her. That’s good enough for now.
