We’ll remember this night right?

A reminder to play…

She’s 4.

She knows mummy is putting her to sleep today. She know’s daddy’s working. Still she negotiates some way to come into the office. She makes small talk, but she knows what she wants.

Daddy, come to bed, okay?

In bed there is rolling and tickling and laughing, her mom’s there too all 3 of us take turns telling stories to each other. Her mom’s is the first to fall asleep. The pillows are a counter of a neatly arranged toy shop.

I’m telling her the story of finding nemo.

She knows, when the story ends daddy is going back to work.

So 3 quarters the way through, she asks to hear it from the beginning again.

She laughs at the jokes, and acts out the parts, and at one point she says’…

“we’ll remmeber this night right?”

You bet kiddo.

She ask me why I don’t carry her to sleep like I used to, I thought I had already done that for the last time in her life, she’s tall for four. I pick her up and pretend to be a train.

“Okay enough,” she says.

I make a second bottle of milk, and accidentally distroy the toy shop, so I have to rebuild it.

Once upon a time, there was a clownfish with one big fin and one little fin, I begin again, and before you know it she’s out. I extract myself out of bed, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

I’m reminded that kittens play, puppies play, elephants, tigers and kids play, that freeplay is how kids learn, that all that was learning and so much more. Now I’m back at my desk editing next week’s newsletters, but I allow myself to put that aside for a moment to write this instead. I know she will remember this night when she’s 44.

I’m writing so I can remember this night too.

What does this have to do with illustration? Well, illustrations allows me to step away from work for 2.5 hours to give myself and my little girl a night we’ll both remember.

Happy Father’s Day

PS: The breakthrough diary, is my effort to sift through the daily newsletters and organise them in a way that shows you the path I took from aspiring to award winning illustrator.