Quality Time With My Ten Year Old

My ten year old daughter is here for the first half of the summer. I've never been a Disneyland Dad, partly because it's expensive and partly because whenever I go to Disneyland without a date, there's plenty of what we, in my Navy days, used to call "eyeball liberty". And being 43, I feel a lot like a pervert with all that eyeball liberty running around.

So, I look for times when I can do little things that make it clear to my daughter that she's as special to me as her sister (who lives with me most of the time). Doesn't have to be much, as long as we get to do it together, and it's just us.

Today, I took off from work early and surprised her with a walk down to the drug store to buy a couple postcards. I explained the gig to my daughter as we walked, and she was up for it, so we bought two postcards and went to the post office to fill them out and mail them.

I wrote: "Happy 150th Birthday, Nevada! You don't look a day over 149!" She wrote, "Happy 150th Birthday, Nevada! Make a WISH!" My kid is cool like that.

Then, we stood in line for a while. And for a while longer. The computer kept giving one of the cashiers a hard time. My ten year old got bored, and I began to see my cool little father-daughter outing becoming a chore. I bought a book of 23-cent stamps from the machine, had my daughter drop the cards in the box and we headed home.

Me: "Well, that was pretty cool, huh?"

Her: "Uh, yeah, SURE." At this point, cars are swerving to avoid huge chunks of ten-year-old sarcasm.

Me: "Okay, it was pretty lame, wasn't it."

Her: (Sagely) "Yeah, it kinda was...but it was a good idea, though!"

She's very sweet and generous, my daughter.

Someday, maybe when she has kids of her own, she'll realize that it never was about the postcards to a town we only ever heard of today.

It was always about taking a walk together and making each other laugh.