Year five of forever
Full disclosure, this photograph was taken about a full month before Father’s Day. This post is being written in advance, by nearly a full month before Father’s Day. Seeing as how would be abroad on actual Father’s Day, I decided to knock this out a little early, so that it would not be looming over my head as a critical must-do, as my departure date drew nearer, so it was in my best interests to take it early, so I wouldn’t have to rush the photo taking, editing, printing, and writing out the corresponding post.
Plus it’s one of the few things I look forward to more than anything in the world, so why not treat myself for a change, especially with the cesspool of S+ difficulty I deal with in my everyday life generally.
Honestly, I still sometimes look at my kids and I can’t believe that I’m a dad. My girls are six and four, so I’ve been a dad for a little while now, but sometimes it still feels surreal that I have contributed towards the creation of lives, and my offspring are already both going to be in elementary school together, start of the next school year.
Even when they were tiny little nuggets of babies, it was hard to fathom what the future would look like, and how these kids would eventually be walking and talking, going to school and having their brains metaphorically exploding with all the knowledge and experience they’d be coming into over the passage of time.
Now, we have conversations regularly, they’re always asking questions, and they can walk, talk, run, jump, and they love to play games and do puzzles and draw pictures and build with Legos. As the current school year came to a close, both brought home little booklets that showed a glimpse of time lapse of their handwriting and their drawing acumen throughout the course of the school year, and it’s amazing to see just how much both of them had progressed.
They’ll always be my babies, but make no mistake, they’re two grown kids that have intelligence, personalities, capabilities and talents already. And I still can’t believe that I had a hand in making them.
One thing I’ve noticed more recently is the fact that my girls have slowly been phasing out “dada” and been more frequently referring to me as just “dad.” It hasn’t been a full-on swap just yet, and dada still comes out from them both, although more from #2 than #1, but it has not gone unnoticed by me that I’ve been hearing a lot more dad instead of dada.
The thing is, I never coached or deterred them from use of one name or the other, it has been happening completely organically to my knowledge. But seeing as how both kids, their first words were dada, it unsurprisingly makes me feel a little melancholy to know that they’re gradually phasing it out of their go-to vernacular.