Matt's introduction

Here is Matt's introduction that he gave at the Mother of the Year luncheon. It was so nice to have him say all these great things about me. I felt very loved.

If you want to see what kind of mother Danielle Kennington is, you only need to watch our daughter at play. Ginny is nearly four now, and yesterday was her first experience driving a car. Her bed was her car, and Danielle was her passenger. And once she had made sure that her mommy had put on her seat belt, the first place Ginny drove to was…the library.

It is no coincidence that the places and activities and things Ginny is learning to love are the same things her mother loves.

Danielle would rather go to the library than anywhere else, except maybe Grandma’s house (which was the second place Ginny drove). Our house is strewn with books, “upstairs, downstairs and in the lady’s chamber.” Danielle has loved books as long as I’ve known her; many of our dates were trips to the BYU library when we were undergraduates. Reading in the car doesn’t make Danielle sick—a fact that has made every road trip enjoyable, especially the long ones.

But it’s not just the love of reading, it’s also the way Danielle reads that Ginny’s picking up. Danielle is a born teacher and is always finding ways to help children learn. I can see the million little things Ginny picks up from her. Just this morning when I asked Ginny to read me a story, she turned directly to the table of contents, ran her finger down the page and said, “This story is on page thirty-pix.”

Sometimes Ginny will sit in the big chair with a pile of books, just like her mommy does when she volunteers as a story-time reader at the library. One by one Ginny will open the books, turn them so Mommy can see the pictures, and improvise a story.

Improvisation, by the way, is another skill she learns from her mommy—especially when it comes to song lyrics. Danielle knows a lot of songs, but she doesn’t know all the words to those songs, and that doesn’t stop her. So I had to laugh in church when Ginny picked up a hymnal (upside down), opened to a carefully selected page, and joined the congregation with her own version of the song. Something about monkeys and Hebbly Fadder.

Because of my wife, Ginny loves to dance. She loves to swim. She loves to sing made-up songs and tell made-up stories. She loves food (but I credit myself with that one). She loves cracking eggs and stirring things in a bowl. She loves to create things and share them with someone. She does not love going to bed, she’d rather stay up and read one more story, one more, one more…

Danielle is a master teacher, not because of her degrees or the years she spent in a classroom, but because she has an inexhaustible supply [of love] ( I can’t remember how he ended it. This is as much as he wrote. He just made up the ending on the spot.)