day no. 15,110: Finneas is 8!

Eight years ago on this day I was driving a maroon 2005 Hyundai Elantra down a moonlit I-35 with a pregnant, laboring wife riding shotgun. She was worried she was going to give birth on the car ride from Story City, IA where our adventure began and Mary Greeley in Ames, IA where our destination awaited. We got to the parking garage and it took us a hot minute to get from there into the hospital and up to the correct floor. Paige's contractions were heavy and painful and she barely made it to the bed before pushing once and out came Finneas Haddon Foxe Van Voorst!

You are an awesome kid, Finneas. I love everything about you. You have energy and ambition and initiative. Because you are a child, these often get you into trouble, but it's the right kind of trouble that I'm excited to watch grow up and become trouble for the right people. It would be a sad thing for a man not be a troublemaker for the darkness. It is an honor to be on their watch list. You are going to do great things. You already are, but they are to scale. As you grow and mature and develop the greatness will scale with you.

You are relentlessly committed to what God said. You argue and fight like someone who believes, at their core, that whatever God said is the final word on whatever topic we are discussing. Your appeals are to Him. You sometimes get what you think is His position wrong, but it's your insistence and reliance upon it in principle because you think it's His position that has me optimistic for your future. 

You are a joy and I love looking across the dinner table at you in the evenings. We currently occupy the respective ends of the table, me at the head and you, I suppose, at the bottom of the table. I'm sure if you were reading this as your 8 year old self, you would appreciate the humor of being both the butt of the joke and seated at the butt of the table. I can hear your laughter now. You have a GREAT laugh! You love to have fun and you are really good at it. You floss like a boss. 

I love you, son. I always have and I always will. I loved you on that car ride from Story City, IA to Ames before I had ever even seen you. I loved you before you loved me. You are special to me and I am so glad that God chose me to be your dad... and that He allowed us to get to the hospital and that I didn't have to deliver you in my car on the side of the Interstate. :)

I love tiny warrior and I always will. No matter what. Forever and ever.
Amen.

Daddy