My Dad

My all-time favorite picture of my Dad. He was laughing and crying when we told him about Finn. :)

Yesterday-my sister posted a picture of my beautiful niece playing with her daddy. She was putting make-up on him.It, of course, made me think of my dad. This is something that I vividly remember about childhood. Now, I was never a huge one for make-up (I'm still really not), but I remember nail polish. I remember my dad letting "us girls" put nail polish on his toenails. Bright pink nail polish, neon green nail polish...really, whatever nail polish that we wanted!



He would let us do his hair, he would walk down the cat-walk for us in crazy outfits. He would make up elaborate story lines for my My Little Ponies. He would tell me crazy stories about "Kool Cat" He still does this...with his grandchildren. Not more than a few months ago, he and Ava put on a fashion show, and Papa strutted down the catwalk in front of the entire family. Or last summer, Ava convinced him that we should play "the dancing game"--which, coincidentally was a game created by Randy (OF COURSE!) where you have to dance in the car and whoever the judge says "wins" gets a point. Well, my dad REALLY wanted to win the dancing game...so he stopped the car, got out of the car, ran in front of the car and danced for all of our street to see! It was hilariously awesome.



All I could think of is...I hope Finn thinks of me this way. I hope my children will look back and see that I didn't care what anyone else thought. I hope they see that my goal was to make them laugh and love and experience life. I hope (so much) that they will remember smiles and laughter and happiness. And, obviously, there will be times that they feel sad, angry, hopeless...but I hope these times are few and far between.

But here's what I know. If he ends up with half of the happy memories of ME and Randy that I have of my dad (and he's only 60--he's got a lot of living left!), then he'll be a pretty lucky boy!