Spain Dad, a baby blog

I’m beginning to think of last Wednesday less as Alleke’s first birthday and more as her Independence Day.

Last night April and I were sitting on the couches and talking after Alleke was in bed. At one point April looked at me, puzzled, and said, “I barely saw Alleke tonight. Did you have her?”

I shook my head.

“I guess she must have been playing with her friends,” April said, thinking out loud.

I smiled. I couldn’t help thinking of the night before.

Our friend Troy had also celebrated his birthday this week, so we threw him a surprise party at his house. I had been working for a few days straight, however, and I hadn’t seen much of Alleke. So, even though we were at a party, I decided to spend some time with my daughter.

Alleke had already run off somewhere, so I began looking around for her until I found her in her friend Nic’s bedroom digging through toys.
When I came in, she glanced up at me and handed me a wooden, yellow block, as if to say, “Take this. You’ll need it.”

She toddled to the door, looked back over her shoulder to make sure I was following, and disappeared into the hallway. I followed.

First we found Meaghan, who was standing at the end of the hallway with a camera. It was her dad’s birthday, and her mom said she could take pictures. So, she lined Alleke (giggling) and her friend Laura up against the wall and took glamour shots.

Next we wandered into the living room and found Grandpa with a bowl of popcorn. Alleke stood at the edge of the couch while Grandpa inspected each kernel, bit off the hard bits, and handed the kernels to Alleke to eat.

After that, we found Nic sitting at the table with his friends playing a game he had made up using his transformer collection and a chess board (some squares scribbled on paper with marker).

Alleke clapped her hands with everyone else when Nic (age 7) won an important game against Jonathan (age 24). Although, to be fair, Nic did have a habit of changing the rules during the game, which often confused his opponent.

Anyway, I mention Meaghan, Grandpa and Nic simply to illustrate that Alelke and I spent the entire evening with Alleke’s friends, wandering from room to room until we had found all of them. My role was simple–I had to carry the wooden, yellow block. Whenever Alleke found someone she wanted to play with, she would take the block from my hand and offer it to the person to see if he or she wanted to play. If not, she would hand the block back to me, and off we would go, looking for Alleke’s next friend.

I suspect Alleke knew all along that she didn’t need me to carry around that wooden, yellow block for her. I think she just didn’t know what else to do with me. She wanted to spend time with her friends (it was a party after all), but she didn’t want me to feel unwanted, so she gave me a job to do.