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