This month of September has been bananas for our family, and the craziness has been compounded the last week or so as I’ve had a terrible cold or some other kind of respiratory bug. So I planned to write a fuller reflection on our youngest, Daisy, for her third birthday today. But I suppose you and I will have to live with this abbreviated version.
Daisy Josephine was born three years ago today. By God’s grace, she was born into a world that was not reeling from a worldwide pandemic, unlike Maggie who was born in April 2020. This meant we got to experience parenting a baby in community with others coming and going from our house without masks or quarantine periods or any of the other hurdles that came with learning to be parents amid a pandemic. I am grateful for that.
As I think I’ve written about before, Maggie and Daisy are quite different. My favorite way to describe their difference lately is to relate them to Disney princesses and their affinity for them. Maggie has more affinity for the prim and proper princesses, I think—the Cinderellas, Elsas, and others. Maggie is often in a dress and styled with various jewelry pieces, ready to attend a grand ball at any moment. This isn’t to say she’s not rambunctious—she certainly can be—but she has a stately way about her much of the time.
Daisy virtually always asks to be put in a dress—even more than Maggie does—but her interest in the prim-and-proper ends there. Daisy has always seemed to have more of an affinity for the princesses who get their dresses dirty amid dangerous adventure—Moana, Merida, and most of all, Rapunzel. Appropriately enough, we’ll be celebrating Daisy with a “Punzel birthday party” (read: Tangled), which she has been requesting (and asking us to pray for) multiple times per week since her sister’s birthday party in April.
I love Daisy so much. Let me share a couple fun times we’ve had lately.
We listen to a lot of music in our house, and it’s a goal of mine to expose our girls to lots of different kinds of music as they grow up. Maggie has latched on to some more contemporary artists, like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, which is fun. More recently as we play with Magna-Tiles or otherwise fool around in our play room, Daisy and I have been listening to some older songs. I’ve had us listening to a Motown playlist on Spotify, and she almost always starts involuntarily dancing when “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder comes on. The other day while we were building with the tiles and that song came on, she just started bouncing up and down, shrugging her shoulders, and I said, “Daisy, you dancin’ over there?” And she said, “I just movin’!” seemingly unaware of the fact that she had been caught up in the music. Similarly, one of my favorite moments recently was when we were blasting Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” in the house before bed one night, and while she was in her room getting into pajamas, Daisy sang, “Just a yittle bit…Just a yittle bit.”
On Monday night of this week we left our community group at about 8:30pm, well past the girls’ bedtime. On short drive home they spotted lightning in the distance, south and east of us, and they were a little concerned that a storm could be on the way—not a good situation when we are rushing to get them home and in bed a solid 90 minutes later than normal. So I took five minutes and explained to the girls the basics of cardinal directions and meteorology, how storms that are south and east of us are almost never going to come our way, but keep moving farther away. Maggie initially replied, “That makes no sense,”—which, fair—but seemed to grasp it after an object lesson in the driveway. Tuesday morning, Daisy woke up around six o’clock, and I took her to the back porch to see and hear the birds in our yard—a common morning ritual when it’s not 85º at that hour. Sitting on the glider looking for birds, Daisy said, “Daddy, are the storms still going to come from the wild west?” I assured her that no storms were going to come from the “wild west,” confused about how she’s encountered the concept of the 19th century American frontier—and then she asked for a re-explanation of the different cardinal directions, which I was glad to provide before it was time to go inside and figure out breakfast.
She keeps us on our toes.
I often think about what our girls will be like when they get older, while resisting the temptation to pigeon-hole or typecast them. When I think about Daisy as a teenager or young adult, it’s hard for me to not see her on some athletic field playing something like rugby, with eye black painted down her cheeks as she chases after someone to tackle in an effort to lead her team to victory—all, somehow, while still in a dress.
