The Golden Hour

My favorite hour of the day is from 6:00 to 7:00 PM. This is my golden hour. This is the time I spend alone with my daughter. I get to see her off in the morning, and I sometimes get to pick her up from daycare. I'm always there for dinner, but Mommy feeds her. From 6 to 7, though, is Daddy Time.

My daily goal with Sera is to make her laugh. She has the most wonderful belly laugh I have ever heard. She laughs so hard sometimes that she literally cannot catch her breath and gets the hiccups. Tonight was one of those nights. I was giving her her bath when she flicked water at me. I jumped back like I was terrified and her eyes just lit up. She spotted weakness! She flicked more water at me and I feigned the same reaction. She started cackling. She repeated the action and so did I. More laughter. After about ten times, I thought she was going to bust a gut. Success!

After her bath, we retire to her room, where we watch an episode of "Tee Tie," also known as Teen Titans. She has the cadence of the theme song now. I sing the lyrics, "When there's trouble you know who to call," and she jumps in with "Tee Tie." It's adorable, trust me. She loves the show, and watches it transfixed from beginning to end. The only character she has shown an affinity for so far is Cyborg. She loves it when he says, "Booyah!" She repeats it as "beeyah!" When we were at my local comic book store last week they had Tee Tie---er, Teen Titans bobbleheads on clearance. When she spotted Cyborg and said, "beeyah," I had to buy it for her room.

Sera hasn't been patient enough to be read to...until now. We have tried on a number of occasions to get her to sit still with a book but she just couldn't hang on long enough. Reading to children is so important to their development that we have felt guilty for not doing enough of it to this point. Magi told me the other day that she let her read a short book to her, so I tried it out tonight. I started with Teen Titans Go #50, because I knew she'd at least look at Tee Tie for a minute. Surprisingly, she sat through half the comic book with dialogue and all! We have so many books to read to her, and I am so looking forward to sharing them with her during my evening time! My favorite book when I was a child was The Boxcar Children, and I can hardly wait to read it to her.

More later.