And the Father of the Year Award Goes to...

I like to think of myself as being a pretty good dad.  Really I do.  But it seems like there are a lot of times when I'm trying extra hard to be a good dad, and that's when I wind up doing the most damage.

Of course we can go back to the summer of 2005 when I took Little Smoot on a super-fun camping trip and she wound up getting run over by a pickup truck, breaking three bones in her foot.  Let's just not go there... but suffice it to say, there's a fine example of trying to be a good dad but ultimately winding up at a hospital.

The other night Little Smoot had softball practice, and she asked me if I'd stay late and do a little more practicing with her.  So my "let's be a great dad" instinct kicked in, and we stuck around and tossed the ball around a bit.  She practiced some batting, and I got it in my head that I should do some batting, too.  You never know when the team might have too few players, and they'll call upon my services to pose as an 11-year-old girl on the team.

Little Smoot headed into the outfield, and I amused myself with my manly ability to smack the ball consistently to the outfield fence with just about every hit.  And Little Smoot would field the ball and throw it back in to me.

Well, you can probably guess where this story is going.  It was just starting to get a little dark, and I was heaving the ball into the outfield in a manly fashion, and one of the balls hit a little rut in the field and took an odd bounce... directly into the path of Little Smoot's nose.

I sprinted into the field as soon as I saw it bonk her in the face, and she looked like a human version of Old Faithful, only instead of spouting water and steam into the air, she was a blood geyser.  I bounced into First Aid mode, trying to figure out how to simultaneously get her to stop bleeding, and figure out how to keep her from ruining the shirt she was wearing since we bought it in Maui and it was one of her new favorites.

It was interesting to try to get her to walk from the outfield all the way to my car with her head tilted backwards and with blood literally dripping from her arms.  Nice job, Dad!

Father's Day is just a couple weeks away.  I'm just hoping that I won't get a lump of coal on this special occasion.