She is a thing of love

I admire my daughter, Cadence, for a lot of reasons. I don’t do enough to tell her of how inspiring her energy can be sometimes. All too often, I let the challenges of my day get in the way of sharing a little of that youthfulness she exudes without effort.

But we have our good times.

A couple times a week, Cadence and I will retreat to our big, empty living room and engage in a friendly (but competitive) game of kick-dodge ball. It would look like child abuse to anyone peaking in our window. I stand at one end of the room and she at the other, and with our feet and hands we launch rubber spheres of various sizes at one another. These can be anything from those small foam stress balls, to our medium-sized purple cloud Wal-Mart ball, to the grandest of all, Mommy’s full-sized white Polities ball. Oh, yeah! That'll strait knock the focus out of ya. It is a blast of a time, great exercise, and pretty frequently played throughout the week—especially on Saturdays. But we could play it more.

Cadence is great at a number of things. She’s been a computer user since she was about 2-years-old. She completed a ballet class last year and gave a great performance before an audience of about 2,000. She loves to read—and is pretty darn good at it if I do say so myself. And she can draw up a storm on any parchment lying around the house—whether it's meant to be drawn on or not.

Recently, I noticed that she’s also pretty good with an impromptu song. She can make up a song about lots of things while stringing together a fairly cleaver set of rhyming words to tell her story. I tried to explain to her the other day that people actually get paid for doing that. She promptly turned her attention to something of greater interest and I let the matter drop. I just don’t know sometimes what’ll swim and what’ll sink when it comes to her interests and my introduction of new ideas. But I know it’s important that I affirm and encourage her, and that she is aware of that encouragement.

Really, I just love her little heart, spirit, mind and all. I want to sit her still for a minute or two and tell her just how much I admire her. She’s got to be the coolest little kid I’ve ever known. Thinking about it, there’s really nothing stopping me from telling her just that.

So I will. And more often, too.