A Father's Day Thank You Letter

As a mom to two girls, one of my biggest concerns is that when they become adults they will find a man who knows what it means to love.  If I had to pick a quote on men, one of my all-time favorites comes from the late Randy Pausch, former professor at Carnegie Mellon and Dad to 3 kids.   He was given a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer with 3-6 months of good health left.  He gave an upbeat lecture titled Last Lecture: Achieving your Childhood Dreams, which went viral on YouTube and his advice to his baby girl when she grows up was:

“When it comes to men who are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do.”

This pretty much sums up my husband and dad to our two young girls.  He is not big on words and over the top romantic gestures, but he more than makes up for it on things that truly matter.  Every morning and when he comes home from work, he sweeps his girls in his arms, dances with them, plays hide-and-seek and peek-a-boo, kisses every booboos, cuddles them to sleep, drops whatever he is doing at one call, and basically, spoils them to a fault. 

He is a hands-on Dad for sure. He knows Ava well enough that milk and reading books are things that make her tick.  I think his 4-step regimen with her before bedtime is absolutely brilliant!  Step 1: Drink milk.  Step 2: Brush teeth.  Step 3: Change diaper.  Step 4: Read books.  By slotting in the unfavorables in between the first and the last, everything finishes in a zip.  It is so effective that I’m doing it before our afternoon naps too! 

Another idea of his, feeding Ava while letting her watch video.  This time, I’m still figuring out if it’s another stroke of genius (since we can stuff her with as much vegetables as we can without her complaining) or just plain bribery at work.  Or probably both!  One thing for sure, he does his piece of the pie in day-to-day rearing.  In fact, my multi-tasking skills have seemed to rub off on him.  He now ‘babywears’ baby Ally for a walk around the neighborhood to get some exercise and buys some groceries while he is at it too!  The girls, without a doubt, feel the love.

Ready for a walk around the neighborhood

Most important above all, he loves their mommy like a true gentleman would.  Not because I still get the best seat in the house, the remote control and the last word (haha!), but in calm, consistent and reassuring ways.  His strength is not the proud, protective, I’m-the-man-of-this-house type, but as a sturdy guidepost that quietly says “I will always be here no matter what”.  

So on this Father's month of June, thank you Daddy for giving us a hundred and one reasons to smile!  Here are some random thank you’s more from the top of my head:

-  Thank you for giving up golf games over going to the parks and zoos.  Ava especially loves your shoulder rides to catch a better glimpse of the lion. 

Where's the lion Daddy?

-  Thank you for trading your sumptuous meal with me.  I don’t know why I always end up ordering the wrong dish and you would have the more appetizing one. 

-  Thank you for reading the humongous 1,336-page pulitzer-prized book “The Powerbroker” and doing my report when I was already overwhelmed with too many assignments getting my Master’s Degree (oops, sorry professor!).  I guess reading birth and nursing books after THAT become easy-peasy.

-  Thank you for knowing that being a stay-at-home mom is difficult too.  It is indeed the hardest job of all.  You enthusiastically take over when you get home from work and bonds with them every night.

-  Thank you for refusing to eat shark’s fin soup - to the amusement of your colleagues, knowing how deeply I feel against it.  We had the last laugh, now that Singapore has banned it from all supermarkets.

-  Thank you for being a don’t-need-to-fix-it-all Martian, for patiently listening to a Venus who just wants to rant and lets out air, even if most of it probably sounded gibberish to you.

-  Thank you for passing your good-looking genes (which have been mistaken for Malay, Indian, Japanese, Italian, except Chinese!) to our beautiful girls (at least half of it! hahaha!).

-  Thank you for being my birth doula.  For reminding me that I don’t need epidural when I thought I could not make it on my first labor.  You knew me well enough that I would have regretted it afterwards.

-  Thank you for not letting me win on our chess and tennis matches, even when I would not quit and dragged us both to mental and physical exhaustion.  I know I am such a sore loser but I would have hated winning anyway if I knew you just let me. 

-  Thank you for continuously giving me intellectual stimulation all these years.  Our skin may wrinkle and sag, but I hope our minds will be at least half as sharp as Lee Kuan Yew when we reach 89.

-  Last but not the least, thank you for being that kind of man - of honest convictions and a believer of great love. 

They say girls draw conclusions about what men are like from the men in their life.  The father becomes her role model for what to expect of men and what to expect of men’s attitude toward women.  Then I guess it should not come as a surprise why I ended up with a good man.  My dad definitely set the bar high! (I shall write a separate father’s day article on him) and maybe I should not worry too much on my girls too.  After all, they have a good Dad to look up to =)  


Happy father’s day to all dads!  We live in a great time when fathers are getting more and more involved, not just in birthing, but in raising our kids too.

Daddy with her girls =)