I'm thankful for my dad. He's taught me a lot. He taught me to be a skeptic. He taught me not to accept the first thing I hear about something. He taught me to be a critical thinker. He taught me the basics: throwing a ball, kicking a ball, riding a bike, how to do math. When I was younger, he taught me to see the good qualities in people when I was speaking disparagingly about others. He's set a great example of how to treat the elderly, and growing up I watched him serving the widows in our neighborhood. I have yet to meet a single person who loves babies as much as my dad does. He really loves my mom. He's always worked so hard, sometimes at the cost of his health and sanity, to provide for us. Even though he's a total workaholic and we all tease him about it, he's always shown up to all our things - no easy feat, I'm learning, with six kids. Yet he is always there at every school thing or whatever else we're involved in, standing in the back with this enormous proud grin and a video camera. When I turned sixteen, he set up a scavenger hunt around the neighborhood and at the end met me in a park and asked me on my first date. He took me to a really expensive restaurant (I'd never been anywhere like that) and then to my surprise sweet sixteen party. At the time I was kind of embarrassed about the scavenger hunt/date thing and how it ended up being my dad of all people, but now I can see how sweet an idea it was. I'm thankful for my dad.
