Fun-loving Fathers

How I love, love, love to watch kids play with their daddies.  Through the years, our girls have all enjoyed the physical, raucous way their daddy plays with them.  Sometimes it hasn’t all been rosy.  Like the time Mick was sitting in the middle of the living room tossing 3yo Rachel up onto the couch.  He’d toss her up and over to the couch, she’d bounce off the couch and come running back, laughing and begging him to do it again.  You can probably guess what happened next.  Yep, he made a slight miscalculation on how hard he needed to throw her to get her to the couch and she landed right in front of it on the floor!  Ouch! 

There were also the times when the tickling went on a little too long (except with Claire – I don’t think that girl will ever get tired of being tickled), or they didn’t appreciate having the living daylights scared out of them.  Speaking of scaring:  why is it that boys love to scare girls so much?  I’ve told our girls about how Daddy, early in our marriage, even enjoyed hiding behind corners and scaring me!  :-D  Or how their Uncle Glenn once hid at the end of a dark hallway and surprised Aunt Kelly by taking her picture (it’s a hysterical picture, by the way – pure shock on her face!)  Or how Uncle Glenn delighted in hiding a rubber snake in various places around the house when he and Aunt Kelly were living with us. 

With Grant, for the first time we get to watch a little boy’s reaction to his daddy’s special style of play – and it is delightful.  He gets such a charge out of being tickled, tossed on beds, rolled on the floor, thrown in the air … you name it – he likes it!  It’s just so different from how his sisters or I interact with him and he responds to it all in such a big way.  This evening was like many others:  Mick gets home from work and soon thereafter, Grant plows into him and the fun starts.  :-)  While I watched them tonight, I thought about how many kids don’t have their dads living at home with them, and what they’re missing out on.  It’s so sad.  I wonder if this type of rambunctious, physical interaction between dads and their kids – especially sons – is much more important than we can appreciate and understand.  I don’t know if it can be quantified in any way, but I just think it matters a lot.