Thank you so much for checking out our brand new blog: SouthBranch. Andrea and I are looking forward to sharing with you the hilarity and heartache that go along with raising two girls, serving on a church staff, and writing, recording, & performing our music. If you haven't yet seen our new website (www.southbranchmusic.com), check it out. You can listen to music, download individual songs or our entire album, order CDs, and check out video & pics, as well as the latest SouthBranch news. In this first blog, I'll keep it short, but I'd like to share an experience I had recently.
The girls ("Missy Miss"--6 years old, and "Little Bit"--3 years old) and I had a daddy/daughter date last night. Mom was hosting a Christmas party for her ladies' Sunday School class at our home, so the kids and I had to get out of Dodge. I knew I was staring straight in the face of one of the most bone-chilling circumstances that any dad could encounter: three hours away from home with the kids BY MYSELF. Three hours of pulling rabbits out of my hat without pulling my hair out. Three hours of walking the tightrope with no safety net. Three hours of herding cats.
You moms out there are reading this and thinking, "What's the big deal? I do that all the time." But you have to understand that there are some logistical factors at work here that you just don't have to face. For example, how am I supposed to work the whole bathroom thing? I don't want to take them into the men's room. That makes for some interesting conversation pieces I'd really rather avoid. I certainly can't go into the ladies' room. (I can see the headlines now: "Local Worship Pastor Banned from Shoney's for Barging Into Bathroom!") And God forbid that I should actually have to go myself! What's a dad to do? Cross my legs all night until my eyeballs float?
And that was just one issue. I also had to lay out an agenda for the evening. This was supposed to be fun, so I needed something really cool for us to do. I mean, we're making memories here, right? So I had to come up with an evening that they would recall with fondness someday when they were choosing my nursing home. PLUS, all this fun needed to come packaged in a way I could handle. Knowing myself as I do, I knew that taking the kids by myself to a crowded mall during the Christmas rush would send me to that nursing home earlier than anyone anticipated. I considered all the options and decided to go conservative with the traditional daddy/daughter date: dinner and a Disney movie.
As a former youth minister, I turned to the one meal I new could soothe the savage beast--be it a hormonal preteen or a cranky preschooler: PIZZA. Ah, pizza...how many times have you turned my mediocre youth programs into ministry gold? It's almost spiritual, all that cheese and sauce and bread, sort of the holy trinity of fast food. If the gospel writers had recorded that after He turned the water into wine at Cana, Jesus transformed their loaf bread into calzones, I wouldn't have been surprised. So Missy Miss, Little Bit and I ended up at the Pizza Hut last night, one of their favorite restaurants I might add.
Oh, it was beautiful: hot pizza, happy children, even ESPN on the TV directly above my daughters' heads. Everything was going great until, you guessed it, potty time. I was knee deep into Sports Center when Little Bit whispered, "I gotta go potty."
What was I to do? She was serious. I'd seen this before. It didn't pay to play around with this or I'd end up having to explain the puddles in our booth to the angry manager of the Pizza Hut. Then Missy Miss chimed in, "Yeah, me too." It was contagious! So I put on my best brave face and calmly walked them both to the door of the ladies' room. Before I opened the door, I knelt down in front of them and got on their eye level, a move I reserved for the most serious father-daughter discussions. I said, "Girls, you're both going into the bathroom, and I'm going to stay out here. Missy Miss, you help Little Bit. Please, girls, please be good in there."
I anticipated a fight: tears, cries of "NOOOOOOOOO Daddy!" that would echo through the restaurant, a subsequent call from Child Services, etc. Instead, they both simply looked at me as if to say, "Why are you so serious?" and said, "Ok." They turned and walked into the restroom together, holding hands--as if this was a regular occurrence, as if they actually helped each other all the time, as if I haven't had to separate them every time they've been in the same room for more than 15 minutes.
I stared at the closed ladies' room door in amazement. My two little girls were much more grown up than I had thought. After a few awkward minutes of my hanging around outside the ladies' room trying not to look like a creep, they emerged smiling, having done their business and even washed their hands--with soap, mind you-- in perfect harmony. (Granted, they dried them on their clothes, but at this point, I wasn't going to nitpick.) We walked back to our table and sat down, and I simply shook my head at it all. My kids were growing up...fast. Last night, I felt that we had officially crossed the frontier from Babyland into Girlhood. I winced as I contemplated the next stop after Girlhood: Teenville. But I shook it off, content in the notion that I was here at the Pizza Hut with my two precious girls and all was right with the world.
--Troy McConnell
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