Photo: channing tatum/instagram
“I had a weekend with Evie outside of L.A. at this little farm cabin sort of thing where we go and spend our weekends when we can,” he explains. “She wanted to make a birdhouse, which is the most dad-daughter thing you can do. But she didn’t just go, ‘Dad, I want to make a birdhouse.’ She’s like, ‘I know how to make the birdhouse.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure? I could help.’ And she said, ‘Yeah no, just help me make it, but I know how I want it to be.’ And I was like, ‘Hmm, all right.'”
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“And as we started to make it, there was no version of her plan that was ever going to work,” he recalls. “But I did respect and love that she planned something and she loves designing stuff and creating things. We got there in the end, but it was a really long journey of watching and not being able to tell her, because she’s a really strong-willed child, what was and what wasn’t going to work. I had to just let her find it.”
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“There is one secret thing that I’ve weaved into the story, which I don’t know if it will work with every parent, but it can be a very Jedi [mind] trick in the best possible way,” he explains. “Evie loves to teach me things. She loves to know that she’s got one over on me or she’s in the power position, and so we wove it in very subtly, where Sparkella helps her dad sparkle-fy his motorcycle.”
“It is a thing that I use a lot with Evie, I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I need help.’ And she really steps up when she thinks she can be helpful,” Tatum, who found his own way to sparkle ahead of the book release in a custom-made tutu from theSparkella x Tutu du Monde Limited Edition Collection, adds.
Tatum jokes that Everly, who celebrates her ninth birthday today, is “like a teenager now.”
“It’s crazy,” he says, adding that along with outdoor adventures and activities, the dad and daughter also play the occasional video games together.
“I’ve definitely become the parent that doesn’t know how to work electronics as much as she does, as far as computers and things,” he admits. “Not that I was ever great at computers anyway, but I was decent at video games and she actually really likes video games and she’s really good at it.”
“I wouldn’t be as open to her playing them, but she’s very, very, very active in other things,” Tatum says. “She loves being outside. She loves doing all the other things that counterbalance that.”
The One and Only Sparkella Makes a Planisavailable now.
source: people.com
