The first day of the new year was spent having a much-needed Daddy & Daughter day with Maly. For whatever reasons, she and I just haven’t hung out lately. Since it was New Years Day, the whole house was off to a late start. After a late breakfast, I gave Maly a belated Christmas present, which was a pair of roller blades. She’d long since outgrown her roller skates, and we’d put off buying her a new pair for over a year.
After I’d taken care of an hours worth of chores, Maly and I went outside to try out the new roller blades. We went up and down on the sidewalk a few times, Maly on her roller blades while desperately holding onto my hand so as to not fall. After a few slow runs down the street we decided to go in the house for lunch.
I made her favorite: Greek salad. After lunch, and because we’d spent the majority of our Christmas vacation in Des Moines sick with the flu, we extended Christmas by watching A Christmas Story (“You’ll shoot your eye out!”) in the living room.
After the movie we played on the Atari Flashback. We played Frog Pond, Sky Diver, Hangman, Space Invaders, Yars’ Revenge, Asteroid, Basketball and Steeplechase. After an hour or so of Atari, Maly said she wanted to go back outside and try out her roller blades again. We sat on the driveway and I showed her how to put them on herself. After taking another run down our sidewalk she asked if we could go around the block. I obliged. We made a long trip of it and talked about nothing and laughed.
We made it back to the house where we found ourselves just sitting in the yard. Maly played with one of her toy ponies in the leaves. I just sat there and watched her play.
At some point we migrated to the backyard. She pulled weeds around her playhouse. We played dragons for a while. She was a water dragon. I was a fire dragon. Playing dragons really just meant I chased her around the yard.
At some point she decided she wanted to go inside. I don’t remember what the context was, but Maly proudly told Elise that she and I’d had a good Daddy/Daughter day. And I smiled proudly. It wasn’t really intentional, but it was definitely a much-needed day of just hanging out with my daughter. I’m not a resolution kind of guy, but I’ve definitely resolved to spend more spontaneous and unplanned time like that with Maly.