Being a dad is the best thing in my life.  I'll never be more proud of anything I do than raising my daughter.  At least until she gets to be a teenager and turns on me, but I'll save that for a later blog.

There are some things, however, that I'm not equipped for.  Thank God she's got a great mom who by and large handles everything on the list below, but as I recently learned on "Dance Photo Day", there are times when it would be handy to have some basic hair styling and fashion skills.  Thankfully, there were some moms who helped me out with the hair and dance costume this past Saturday; otherwise, the photos would have likely been fubar'ed.

Here are the top five things that I either struggle with currently, or will struggle with when the times comes:

 

 

  1.  Hair - Even a pony tail is hard for me to manage (unless of course I have a vacuum handy)
  2.  Clothes - Thank God my kid goes to Catholic school.  This greatly limits the choices I have to pick out for school clothes. Still though, I recently bought her some regular clothes at the mall and I thought I made some great choices.  Her mother hit me with two questions that I had no answer for: "Why would you buy jeans for the summer?" and "Why would you pay this much for jeans?"  The real question should have been "Why do you even try to shop for her?"
  3.  Boys - This hasn't happened yet, but I'm sure it will.  I know that there will be that first serious boy that she has a crush on.  I'm pretty certain that I won't like him, won't trust him and would be happy if he moved away.  However, if he doesn't feel the same way and makes her sad, I will have to hide my happiness that he's not going to be a problem and express some sort of sorrow for her loss.  I don't do emotions very well, so I'm guessing she'll end up crying, slamming her door and telling me that I just don't understand things.
  4.  Biological Girl Stuff - No need to go to deep into this one...I just hope the first instance of this doesn't happen on my watch.  Her mother asked what I would do if it did and I suppose I would just tell her to walk it off or something. (Thanks Al Bundy)
  5.  Gossipy Girls - This is similar to the "Boys" issue.  I suppose this can happen with boys too, but in my experience, girls are meaner.  At some point, some girl will say something hurtful (or post something hurtful) and I will have to suppress my natural response of "Who gives a s**t what that b***h thinks! " and come up with something more fatherly and understanding.  It's hard for me to look at her and imagine someone wanting to hurt her in any way, but it's a part of life.  Someone will take everything I've got to not make it worse by getting angry.

To all the dads with little girls out there, good luck!  It's totally worth it.

A quick note about the photo above: I have a new phone and for some reason, just before I snapped the picture, it "bunnied" her.  It was not intentional.

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