Three Year Old Pride
In case you have never met me or followed me on any social media channel, I attended a conference last weekend called, Blissdom Canada. At this conference, I was given the opportunity to do my very first presentation, with slide show and everything. Yeah, I know, bad ass! It was an amazing and exhilarating experience and one that I won’t soon forget.
After the presentation, I received so many supportive and encouraging tweets, messages and face to face compliments, that I was on cloud nine until…well, I’m still kind of there but that’s not the point. Something else happened that trumped all of that, which probably sounds hard to believe.
I was lucky enough to have my amazing wife there, who spent the whole weekend making sure our kids were having a great time on their mini vacation. They told me all about their swimming pool adventures and it was great to see how excited they were to have met the “Real” Chuck E. Cheese! I was sad to miss out on all the fun but realized that without the conference we wouldn’t have been there anyway. Plus, they got a chance to come down and watch my first ever presentation, which was really special for me.
I caught them on their way back from dinner on the last night and as I was talking to them, my three year old daughter started playing with my conference badge, which hung from a lanyard around my neck.
“What’s this, Daddy?” she asked
“That’s my ticket for Daddy’s conference, honey” I replied, figuring I could have said anything and she wouldn’t have really understood.
Then she hit me with the bomb…
“Did you get that for being so good on the stage today?”
She stared, very matter of factly, into my eyes as she said it and I couldn’t help thinking that she knew exactly what she was doing and how much it meant to me. I was thankful for all the nice words from everyone throughout the day, but for your three year old to express pride in something you did is beyond words. I mean, having your children be proud of you is part of the goal, right?
I hugged her so quickly and tightly that I’m hoping she didn’t get a chance to see the tears. Not because I felt the need to hide them, but they would have been hard to explain at that point. This was just one of the memories at made at Blissdom Canada but it’s one of the ones that will stay with me forever.