"I Gotta..."

To say that my daughter has my husband wrapped around her little finger, is a complete understatement. Adriana can sweet-talk that man into almost anything. He loves his boys and enjoys doing all sorts of boy things with them, but his girl is his princess. The other day I asked him to go into Adriana's room to tell Little Miss Chatty that she needed to lay down and take her nap. After a few minutes, he emerged with her in his arms.
"She says she's not tired," he explained with a sheepish grin.
At night, Steven puts the boys to bed; and I put Adriana to bed. We each have our own bedtime traditions. The boy's ritual include things like "Monkeytime Stories" (Daddy's created-on-the-spot stories), "The Banershky Speech" (I'm not even going to try to explain that one), and prayers. Adriana's bedtime routine is a bit more tame and includes book reading, the "Gospel Song" (which she now can sing so sweetly), and her prayers. But one thing her routine must include is a last kiss from Daddy. If I forget to call him in, her daddy jokingly pouts and gives me a very hard time. Obviously she's picked up on this; and as I finished the "Gospel Song" a couple nights ago, she put her hand over my mouth. In an emphatic big girl voice that made me stop in my tracks, she told me, "I gotta kiss Daddy!" You can imagine how much more her father's heart melted when he heard that one...