Three is a Magic Number

It’s interesting to me that this blog not only comes on the week of Finley’s third birthday, but is actually blog entry

number 150. That gives me a nice round average of 50 blogs per year, with 2 weeks off each year for good behavior. Of course several of those blogs were just a bunch of pictures. To be honest, it’s tough sometimes to come up with interesting nuggets of fatherhood tales to make at least a passably interesting blog.

Sometimes I wonder if I bit off more than I could chew by promising myself to have an entry once a week. It wasn’t so tough in the beginning, because the newness of an infant and it being the first time through this whole parenthood thing, I was able to spout about all the recent stuff I was discovering. Not that I’m not discovering new things with Finley, these days. It’s just that it’s not as fresh and exciting as it seemed to be at the start.

But then we rented a movie a few weeks ago called “Julie and Julia.” It’s about this would-be writer (Julie) who wanted to blog about something and decided to cook her way through Julia Childs’ first book, “"Mastering the Art of French Cooking." It takes her a year to go through all 500-plus recipes and she ruminates about each one. And as entertaining as it was to see her fight, fuss, and fawn over her culinary creations, it certainly wasn’t parenthood. Not that I’m comparing my blog with hers, but she stopped after a year. Who knows how long I can go?

My point being that a blog – especially this one – evolves. But Julie’s blog had a start and an end and could only evolve so much. Mine is limitless. I’m bound by one thing… my muse… my Finley.

And here we are, just days away from the Little Miss’ third birthday. What an amazing three years it has been. Each year seemed to be marked with some sort of advancement on the human evolutionary scale. From birth to one year she became mobile and was walking before that first birthday. One to two was the introduction of words and two to three was putting it all together into cohesive sentences and three million questions. Add a little sass, a few drops of attitude, and you have a three-year old.

But there’s something else that strikes me as interesting about Finley as I watch her make her way through this giant world. She is a very sweet and inquisitive girl. She doesn’t do “mean” things and if she hits or has a mini tantrum – mostly related to frustration – she immediately apologizes. She is learning right from wrong and is actually pretty good at choosing the right path.

Sure, she likes to test us, but that’s what we’re here for. We’re the crash test dummies of her life. Through us, she finds out what is and isn’t acceptable in the outside world. And as tiring as that can be at times, it’s good to see she’s learning from it.

So some how, magically, my daughter is three. She’s on the back end of toddlerhood and is about to head into the land of the pre-schooler. I expect there to be a lot more in the way of questions and probably some more head butting in the fight for independence (Guess which country King Daddy represents?).

But more importantly, I expect to see some major advancement in learning. We’re on the cusp of reading and the concept of time. We’re also real close to getting a small bike with training wheels. I see a clock and scraped knees in my future.

And as all these things come to pass, I also hope to see more in the way of affection. I’m already seeing small signs of this. She’ll occasionally cuddle up with me on the couch and she doesn’t want me to leave daycare without a kiss, a hug and a wave goodbye out the window.

Three certainly is a magic number. I hope that someday, when she’s older and reads these silly posts from her silly Dad, she realizes just how magical she is. …and way better than a blog about deboning a duck.