This post may contain affiliate links. Purchases made through these links support our family’s work in sharing the Gospel around the globe. Thank you!
This one turns six on Sunday. Six.
And while I want to say, “six years already?” and bemoan all the days that are slipping through my fingers, my heart is so full of a delicious amount of Birdie-isms and random leap-into-your-arms hugs and squeals of delight that I feel I’ve already been gifted a lifetime of joy in this one little person.
Some people are just happy. Contagiously, outrageously, happy. As much as I want to be one of those people, I’m not. I am content, I am peaceful, I am joyfully present. But happy is not my default. It’s my aspiration. But for Birdie? For Birdie, it’s way of life. Birdie equals happy, and if you’ve spent ten minutes in her presence, you can feel it. It’s in her shy smile, it’s in her chirpy little voice, it’s in the eager kick of her legs as she roosts in a chair just a bit too big for that still-growing little girl body.
A perfect day for Birdie begins with a cuddle from her Daddyman. She is—has always been— a Daddy’s girl. The way she slings her arms around his neck and buries herself into him even now, as her feet dangle well below his knees, always makes my heart dance for both of them. In a sea of wrestling and wrangling boys, they have this soft place. A girl and her daddy. What a wonderful start to any morning.
Birdie’s favorite things, if she had to go about naming them, would be her Little House on the Prairie Christmas DVD, the sweet “dancing girls” Melissa at My Gigi Doll made for her years ago, her necklace with the tiny elephant carved from a bit of wood as a charm, and the swings out back. I wouldn’t even think to ask her of a list of her favorite people, because it would be both too long and too emotional if, by accident, she forgot to throw in the name of someone she met once who she decided was a friend for life.
Birdie is strong. She has more courage in her little finger, I think sometimes, than I can muster in my whole body. At six she has already loved and lost and learned that doing so makes you richer, not poorer. I think that’s about the biggest lesson anyone anywhere can learn this side of heaven.
Sometimes people hear her name, Birdie, and ask us how we decided to call our little girl such a nontraditional thing. But it’s never people who know her who ask. It’s always new friends, acquaintances, people who haven’t yet been handed a bundle of clover “just for you!” or heard her singing “Amazing Grace” with all of her crazy, mixed up lyrics. It’s never someone who has sat beside her on the couch for just one more chapter of The Ultimate Dick and Jane Storybook Collection, her favorite book from which to read aloud. Those people? They know why she’s called Birdie. In fact, it would never occur to them to call her anything else, because only a little bird can hold so much happy that it flies.