A Note For My Kirynie

Kirynie, this is a post from your dad to you.

Honey, you have just finished the First Grade, and are on your summer holiday now.  First of all, congratulations!  Not just for finishing your year at school, but for doing so well at it!  You got high marks all around!  You are especially talented in your reading and comprehension.  Our goals for this summer are to get you trained up in farm management, learning to feed the animals and to care for them properly.  You take good care of them, and they will take good care of you.  We have eight egg laying chickens, five leghorns intended for meat, one cow for meat for next year, and a horse, as well as five llamas!  We hope to get more animals this summer too.  There is work to do on where we house the animals.  Fences and gates all need care.  You are going to be learning all about all of this, and much, much more!  I want you to be confident in all of these areas, so that as you grow older, you will fearlessly face whatever challenges life throws at you.  You may decide to live in a house in the city, and when some wild animal runs through the neighborhood, I want you to be the one who knows what to do, rather than one of the many who might run senselessly scared.  I have learned one thing early and kept it all my life.  No matter how strong your body ever is, if you have power in your mind, you can overpower just about any challenge. 

You are an amazing little girl!  You are sweet, and you are pretty good at doing what you are told.  If you keep that up, you will be open to learning lots of new things from us, because we don’t tend to tell you what to do just because.  You can learn from everything!  I am so proud of you honey!  I am so happy and feel so lucky and honored to be your daddy.  Thank you for who you are!  Thank you for being the wonderful person you chose every day to be.  Thank you for sneaking past me in the morning sometimes, and giving me a kiss before you go downstairs.  I notice.  Giving the gift of love is one of the most generous things you can do in life.  It is a gift I cherish deeply from you! 

Yours with unyielding love,

Daddy, Kelsey

New Glasses

Kirynie, it has been a while since I have posted anything here for you, honey.  You are six years old now.  For about four days now you have been wearing glasses!  I cannot even believe it!  You look so mature, and so big, and you look very intelligent!  I don’t have a picture handy to post for you, sadly.  Perhaps I will remember to get one on here in the next few days. 

When I was a kid and I had to wear glasses for the first time, I was so scared.  I already got teased a bit at school by a couple of other kids who didn’t like me, and I didn’t want to add fuel to their fire by showing up in glasses.  But my teacher, Mrs. Daily, was a very unforgiving and hard teacher.  She walked past my desk while everyone was writing, and slammed her palm down on it and yelled, “You get your glasses on mister!”  There was nothing I could do but put them on, so very reluctantly I reached into my desk and pulled them out and put them on.  Well, of course I got called Four Eyes and all of that.  Some of the other kids were very cruel.  And that is why I was always nervous about getting their attention. 

When you went to class for the first time with your glasses on, you just walked right in proudly wearing them, and talked to your friend, a little girl you liked.  A little boy who was sat half way across the room stared for quite a while.  Everyone else mostly just carried on with their work while I spoke to your teacher, Mrs. Earl.  Mrs. Earl was very excited for you because you had been really struggling to see what she would write on the white-board.  We agreed that your studies would probably improve, which is saying something as you were already doing really good in your classes. 

As for me, I was so proud of you.  Something changed about you, and you just embraced it and ran forward with it full steam!  I could not have been happier as a father, to see how you smiled and how you spent your first day looking at things whose details had gotten lost in a blur to you before, and how you smiled when you met up with others you knew, and beamed about your new glasses. 

I attended your appointment with you when you were tested for a prescription.  I have a bad left eye, and my vision is quite blurred in it.  I was sat about as far from the wall as you were, and even with my bad eye I could make out the shaped projected there with greater ease than you could, by far.  Your mom and I have decided you get your bad vision from her side, if any, as she has quite bad eyesight in both eyes, like you. 

I love you sweet Kirynie, and I am so happy that you can see well with your new glasses. 

Love,

Daddy

Happy Birthday From Daddy..!!

Kirynie, today is your third birthday, which is so amazing to me because it has already been three years since that day in Worcester that your mom and I were at the hospital, and we took a walk in the Nunnery Wood, your mom on her crutches, trying to encourage you to pop out and say ‘hello..!!’  Of course, now you say hello all the time, and without any help from anyone else!  These last three years have been such an adventure for our family because we had you, we learned how to keep food down you, which was a little difficult at first, then we prepared for our big move, then we flew from England to America, and finally we settled down on a ranch in Nevada, and got horses and chickens and pheasants and ducks.  The whole time you have been going from baby in tow to little girl in charge, learning how to do as much as you could, and always making everyone around you smile and always making me so proud of you! 

Of course, by the time you actually ever READ this on your own, you will be much older, and you will have grown so much more.  Well, my darling, today is the day we celebrate your third birthday, and even though we are still settling in and we can’t get you everything I would like to, it doesn’t matter because you are already everything I could ever want, and that’s how family is.  We have each other, and for that I am the happiest man on Earth!  I hope that you have grown to be as happy as can be, and that whatever has happened in the years between when I wrote this, and when you are sat in that chair, reading it, you have learned to be happy no matter what, to keep learning no matter what, and to make the best choices you can with as much confidence as you can muster, then follow through with courage. 

As I write this, you are across the room from me, teasing Dylan, and smiling as big as can be.  You are learning to form the I Love You sign with your hands and whatever other signs you can learn.  We are heading in to Las Vegas tomorrow, and we are looking forward to getting there and having a lunch that I am planning on dedicating in part to your birthday at the Firelight Buffet in the Sam’s Town Casino.  Right now, the Space Shuttle Atlantis is on it’s last mission, and the last mission for the Space Shuttle program, something that has been going since I was in grade school.  Gas costs nearly $4 per gallon today, though it has gone just over $4 in the past, but when I was a kid I remember prices like $0.64 per gallon, and of course everybody is complaining about $4!  A gallon of Milk costs $3.23 at the local market, and horse feed is costing us $215 per 1,200 pounds bag of Alfalfa cubes.  Barak Obama is the President of the United States, and Elizabeth is the Queen of England.  Osama Bin Laden was killed two months ago, and every day, the world seems like it is about two days from the collapse and end of everything we know, yet we still trudge on, despite the perceived uncertainty.  You keep trudging on too, because that feeling is actually NORMAL!  You will be fine as long as you make good choices and stick to being YOU..!!! 

I love you, Kirynie!  You are learning to speak so well, and you always seem to know what’s going on and what you are doing.  You are wonderful beyond words to me!  You still sleep in our bed, and to be honest, I love having you to snuggle up with!  I seldom ever get angry at you for anything, even though I sometimes have to be stern with you to help you to learn. 

Your blonde hair and your blue eyes contribute to your cute little face, and attract so much attention to you from complete strangers.  I have long lost count of how many people both in England and in America have stopped me and said how cute you are.  You attract attention!  As a father, this is more than a bit frightening at times, and fills me up with more than a little pride as well.  But I know something strangers don’t, and that is that under your shyness, and under your cuteness, there is a little girl who is bound to become a woman, and who is already one of the most amazing people, at THREE, that I have ever known in my life! 

I am happy beyond expression to be your father, and I love you so much, Kiry!  Happy Birthday, and may you have an hundred more  of them! 

Yours in the love and sincerity that only a father can offer you,

Kelsey J Bacon, your Daddy! 

Happy Birthday–The Sound Of It…

Dear Kiry,

I just wanted to tell you that you are growing so big, and I am loving you so much!  I love all the things that you do, I think, with the exception of one…

You love to sing “Happy birthday to you!”  You keep repeating it over and over.  And the repetition is not even what bothers me about it.  What bothers me about it is that it sounds exactly like you are singing “Happy DEATH day to you!”  Please darlin’, knock it off! 

I love you!

Love,

Daddy!