“…actually…”

The great thing about kids is the spontaneous memories they serve up. The great thing about blogging, is that you have this awesome place where you can quickly jot down memories and capture those moments so you never forget them.

I don’t wanna forget this weekend.

Aside from all the fantastic Halloween festivities, we were invited to our friends Tracy & Michelle’s son’s birthday party on Sunday afternoon. Davis and my daughter both attend the same Montessori school, and I’ve been friends with Tracy now for (whoa…) over ten years (it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, bro!). So it’s such a treat to spend time with great friends, have our kids grow up together and to become so close. Tracy is wildly creative, and together with Michelle, seem to outdo themselves every year. Last year it was race cars, complete with a custom “Hot Wheels” invitation, and this year Davis wanted a “spooky” birthday, so imagine how shocked my daughter was to receive a skull in the mail. Not a box containing a skull. Not an envelope with a skull inside. A skull. With her name and address printed on the back of the head. My wife said, “who knew the post office would deliver a skull?” Apparently Tracy did.

So with my daughter dressed as (and I’m quoting directly here) a “Vampire Queen Princess”, me as a zombie, my wife as a pretty hot vampire (seriously… wow), and a 5 month old pumpkin, we headed over to their house for the party. Great food, great guests (my wife remarked on the way home, “you know, I really loved all the people there tonight” and I had to agree…) and great fun ensued.

But the moment that I hope I’ll never forget was a flash of my daughter’s personality that only briefly appeared, but was so beyond awesome in delivery and timing. I’m not sure a blog post can do it justice, but I don’t care. I’m really just putting this down so some day when I’m old and feeble, and my daughter Googles her old man’s blog from way back when, it might jog my memory and I’ll be able to relive the moment again. At least that’s the plan.

It happened during the “games” portion of the party. Michelle had set up this sort of “egg toss” type game. On one side were these cute little paper buckets that each child had, and on the other side, a couple of yards away, were bowls of candy corn. The idea was, you run to the bowl, fill your spoon with candy corn, then walk back carefully and fill your bucket. It was great watching the kids struggle with carrying spoonfuls of candy corn all of two yards without dropping the entire contents of their spoon all over the back yard.

Naturally, kids being kids, and groups being groups, and of course attention spans being attention spans, at some point during the game, one of the little boys became a little distracted and was no longer really “into” the game. He was drifting a little and had sort of lost interest. In an effort to cajole him a little and get him “back into the game” one of the parents was standing on the sidelines egging him on a little. I don’t remember his name (wish I did) but for the sake of the story, we’ll call him Chris. He’s positioned right next to my daughter, who is laser-beam focused on getting a bucket full of candy corn, one spoon at a time. She’s almost completely oblivious to what’s going on next to her.

“Chris! Chris! Come over here Chris! Don’t you wanna play the game? Don’t you wanna win a prize?”

That was all it took to get my daughter’s attention. She stopped everything she was doing and turned to the parent doing the shouting.

“um… actually, I’m going to win…”, then, without another word, turned back to finish her (obviously, duh) preordained task.

I really didn’t know what to do or say… except deep in the pit of my stomach, I got a little knot…

“why wasn’t I videotaping this?”