Holding Out for a Hero

Right, now that you have Bonnie Tyler's massive blond mane and raspy voice singing through your head, we can continue. It has been said that a dad is his daughter's hero. He can do anything, fix anything, be anything. He is stronger than Superman, faster than the Flash and can handle more repair jobs than Bob the Builder. His mighty arms provide comfort and in his presence nothing can go wrong. And as a dad, that is a lot of pressure!

My little one clearly has a lot of faith in my fatherly abilities. One night, while outside and gazing at the full moon (which she has always adored) she asked me to hold her up high so that she could touch it. I had to explain rather quickly that it is quite far away, and that she wouldn't be able to reach. Another time she brought me a rubber toy that had been treated rather differently than the designer had anticipated and was thus mangled and broken. With her big beautiful brown eyes sparkling with daughterly trust she asked me to repair it. I should explain that it had started off its life as a rubber lizard, but now resembled a thoroughly masticated jelly baby. I had to tell her that, unfortunately, said rubber lizard was beyond even my ability to repair.

There are many other examples of her tremendous trust in my supernatural abilities:

• She once asked me to make a helium balloon float again.
• Another time she asked me to pick up her boerboel and throw him on the house's roof so that he could chase and scare off birds that were annoying her.
• On another occasion, while preparing to make dinner, she declared that because I had handled the food it had magically been made edible and wanted some immediately.
• I have to occasionally do animal impressions for her as a game, the most interesting request was to pretend to be a zebra (with all the appropriate sound effects)
• She recently went on her first major airline flight and enjoyed it so much that she constantly requests to do it again. Once, when I answered that it was too expensive to do it regularly, she told me to simply build a Boeing so that we would have one of our own.

I suspect that dads everywhere can identify with the adoration that our little ones shower upon us. But I also suspect they can identify with the weird requests that our kids can come up with, because let's face it, in their innocent eyes we are all heroes.