The FP

That’s code for Favorite Parent.

We definitely have one of those in our family, and it’s definitely Papa. I don’t take it too personally because I mostly know why. Papa is the parent who is around the least, and when he is around it’s all about having fun. One of the reasons I married Simon was because I knew he would be an amazing father. I’m not sure how I knew that exactly, since I’d never really seen him around kids, but I just knew.  And I was right.

Unfortunately, Papa also doesn’t believe the following things are very important in a child’s life- eating healthy, a reasonable bedtime, doing homework, learning to read, getting to school on time, wearing bike helmets, parent supervision, etc.  So all of that stuff is left for me to handle- making me the annoying parent who makes the girls do all of the boring/ un-fun things in life. Our differing parenting styles are probably the biggest challenge in our marriage. I wish the “responsible” part of parenting wasn’t mostly on me. Hopefully when our girls are older and possibly parents themselves, they’ll realize that even though I wasn’t the FP, what I did for them was also important. One can hope, right?

Having said all of that, just like me, Simon loves our girls more than anything else in the world, and he shows them every day. I am SO thankful for that. The bar is set very high for future partners of our girls!

how she looks at him!

playing computer games together

Most of the pictures drawn are for Papa. The meager few that I get are like gold (to me).

Kiera saved one of her precious chocolates for Papa (and wrote a K LP on it- Kiera Loves Papa).

She’s a smart girl- she put it where she knew he’d find it- his laptop!

typical scene when Papa comes home

It’s just as easy to spell “Mama” you know…

The other day I overheard Kiera say to Quinnie, “I wish Papa was the boss- then we could eat candy ALL day!” (Simon always tells the girls that I’m the boss). There’s no question that I’m the disciplinarian in the family. Kiera  took a video (below) of Quinnie pretending to poke her with a needle. All it took was the dreaded threat of, “Stop it or I’m going to tell Mama!” to put an end to it.

As an experiment one day, when the girls were being annoying I said, “Stop it or I’m going to tell Papa..” They both paused and looked at me blankly for a few seconds before busting out laughing…