Up until now, my husband has been in complete denial about our daughter becoming a young woman. To him, she is still the tiny little baby who slept on his chest for the first several months of her life, the little girl who called every insect a “bee” because that’s all she could pronounce, and the sweet innocent three year old who said she wanted to marry her brother when she grew up (don’t worry, we informed her that it’s not done that way!)
A few months ago, when she started buying clothes from the woman’s section at the store, my husband refused to accept that she could possibly be that big. Every time she wore one of the outfits and asked “do you like my dress, dad?” he would say, “I hate that dress!” It became a joke between them that he would not admit that she was
all grown up.
But along came her twelfth birthday and with it, the cold, hard facts. She was no longer his baby girl. Accepting that she was now a young woman, and heading into some of the biggest years of her life, her dad decided it was time to do something special (and I must take this moment to say that ALL of this from start to finish came completely from Len, on his own, without any input from me. I know, I’m still in shock about it too.)
For her birthday, she received this invitation from him:
(p.s. he meant semi-formal, but as I said, he did this on his own! And pretty well too!)