Happy Birthday Dad!

It's my dad's birthday today so I thought I should write a post in honor of him because as he always tells me, he won't be around forever!

One of my funniest memories of my dad is how my sisters and I used to drive him crazy by kicking the back of the seat in our old Suburban. He is like the Princess and the Pea the way he can feel even the slightest pressure through a car seat. If we even touched it he would say, "Stop kicking the seat!" It was so amazing that we would have silent contests to see who could touch the seat more lightly with the tip of a tiny toe until he stopped feeling it. We never found out. He felt everything and then after a while, usually in traffic, he would get fed up with it and wave his arm around behind his seat while he was driving, but we would just tuck our legs up and laugh quietly.

I remember on one long trip to Grandma's when we were driving through St. Paul at rush hour in the summer (before air conditioning) and we were stuck in traffic. Dad was frustrated. We were bored. It just so happened that this was about the time that the Dukes of Hazzard was all the rage, and my sister Amy and I loved Bo Duke. I was looking out the window, occasionally giving Dad a whack to the back of his seat, and I saw a man in the car next to us who looked a lot like Bo Duke. Knowing my sister would like to see him, I turned to her and said, "Hey, he looks like Bo!" and pointed out my window. By the time we looked back, there was a different car next to us with a guy that looked more like Mr. ZZ Top than Bo Duke and we absolutely roared with laughter, and everyone knows you can't roar with laughter without kicking the front seat! So then we said, "He looks like Bo" to every car we saw, and when we saw how much each driver did not look like Bo, we roared and kicked even more. We were out of control. We got the "Knock it off!" warning, we got the arm-waving-around behind the seat, we got the "Do I have to stop this car?" threat, but nothing worked. We totally lost it. When he finally got us to at least be quiet, we still played by just pointing at people and making funny faces and then cracking up. It was the funniest thing in the world. Thanks for not killing us that day, Dad!

Happy Birthday Dad! I love you!