It’s hard to find genuine excitement lately. Everything carries some undertone of anxiety or gets spun into either a partisan or covid-response lens.
I get it. When things are spiraling out of control it’s hard to disengage.
But it’s as tiring as when teenagers figure out double-entendre and insufferably snicker at every other word.
That’s one of the reasons I’m so lucky to spend my days with my 22-month-old daughter Senita.
She gets excited about everything. Her latest favorite is recognizing the letter “O,” even when it’s just a zero or a doughnut.
Driving around with her sounds like there’s a tiny person in my backseat having epiphanies but she’s not shouting “oh,” she’s shouting the letter “o” because we passed the sign for Hobby Lobby.
There is an unrelenting monotony to the stay-at-home dad life but my daughter has the exact same day as me and always finds it magical.
When I got excited that a school bus was passing our house, I realized that her joy is the antidote to the monotony.
That I got Senita to turn in time to see the bus herself (and share a wave with an equally-excited elementary schooler) felt like a stroke of luck.
In that moment there was no concern about whether it’s sound policy for students to be on busses during a global pandemic or worrying about carbon emissions.
It was just a big, brightly colored bus rumbling through the neighborhood with a friendly kid waving out the window.
I go out of my way to facilitate these seemingly serendipitous moments like watching the birthday balloons after the 12-o-clock news’ weather forecast.
This is a simple scroll of viewers’ birthdays with upbeat music and a picture of balloons but it brings immeasurable joy to Senita’s day when we catch it.
She also gets just as excited about reading the news.
When I pick up the newspaper I usually throw out the circulars and skip over the ads but she’s barking at the Humane Society dog and flipping through the grocery store circular identifying, “oranges, bananas, and grapes” as if she’s just solved the DaVinci Code.
The most mundane things are magical in her eyes. Opening the garage door from the inside is as worthy of a countdown as launching a rocket to the moon. And, when the garage door opens turning a wall into a portal to the outdoors, it’s always a reason to cheer.
Her favorite thing to do is walk around outside announcing everything she sees.
“Puppy.” “Door.” “Window.” “Tree.” “Leaf.” “Leaf.” “Leaf.” “Tree.” “Flower.” And so on and on and on.
Unfiltered joy pours straight from her excitement of making a mental connection into her thrill of sharing the experience out loud with words that she’s still learning.
While this usually adds considerable joy it can also lead to some awkward social interactions.
For example, we now own a pool house. I’m still not quite comfortable saying that out loud because it sounds so ostentatious. Yet Senita seizes on it without any of my inhibitions.
Earlier this week she spotted it through the trees right as we stepped onto the road behind our house and joyfully shouted over and over again “pool house, pool house” as we walked the length of our property.
Normally I wouldn’t mind, but my new neighbor was directly across the street standing in a housecoat talking to someone in a car. I don’t know what they were saying but I’m guessing it wasn’t something about the humble new family living in the house at the end of the street.
The intensity of Senita’s observations also leads to some pretty intense loitering in front of other peoples’ houses. Christmas decorations are going up in the neighborhood and all of them amaze Senita.
We spent a solid five minutes in front of one neighbor’s house saying “penguin, hat” over and over again and then another good five minutes two doors down “ho ho ho”ing at Santa and saying “pants,” which the decoration was indeed wearing.
I’ve been teaching Senita how to dress herself and identifying pants is naturally very exciting to her so it gave me great joy to stand there with her unironically finding pleasure in Santa’s pants.
It’s nice to be able to think about Santa’s pants without making it weird. I haven’t had the maturity for that since I myself was a cynical teenager snickering at every other word.
Those basic sarcastic associations are easy to fall back on but they’re also exhausting and inherently self-limiting; it’s a welcome relief to shed them and air things out a bit without the need for any further comment.
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