My Heart Belongs
To Daddy

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Memories and stories
of some great fathers.

1.1!

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n the middle of the night, my hus-
band and I often awake to a tiny whim-
per, a slight pushing, and finally a sweet
little body, still soft with baby fat, snug-
gling up beside us.
It's our boy, 3-1/2-year-old Yitzhak,
coming to sleep with us. Again. He
climbs over me, then baby Talya, final-
ly moving in close as he can possibly be
to his father.
(And yes, I've already read all
those articles and books about how to "Get your child
to sleep in his own bed.")
Yitzhak's big sister, Adina, is 100 percent Daddy's
girl. She tries to be polite about it, at least. "I love
you, Mommy," she'll say. "It's just that I really want
Daddy to read to me."
Talya, at 4 months, is still mostly mine (it's the
nursing). But I have no doubt that one day soon she,
too, will know that there's no one in the whole world
better than her Daddy.
On Father's Day, I join with our readers in hon-
oring the most important men in our lives: our fa-
thers, and the fathers of our children. They're the
ones who never fail to tell us we look beautiful even

when we're having a very bad hair day, and the ones
who insist any girl who doesn't want to go out with
us must be an idiot. They're the ones who teach us
baseball and soccer and basketball, the ones who
play endless games where, "I am a little kitten
named Snow Angel and I have pink, sparkly ear-
rings and I live in a castle and I have really soft
fur and you are the handsome prince and you come
to marry me and then we go off and live in a cas-
tle, okay?"
One of the things I love best about my husband,
Phillip, is that he's a remarkable father to our chil-
dren. He is patient, loving and kind. And he is smart
enough to answer all their questions.
"Why did God make bad diseases?" Adina recent-
ly asked me.
"Hmm, better go ask your father," I said.
"How do you make plastic?" she asked several days
later.
"Better go ask your father," I answered again.
Now, she knows better than to even bother with
me. "Daddy knows everything, doesn't he?" she says.
"Yes, he does."
"We are lucky to have him," she tells me.
"We are," I say. "We are very, very lucky."

