It seems like only yesterday. But today, my baby girl is 10. And tomorrow, she won’t be a child anymore.

We’re too busy. Our lives are too frantic. Our priorities are out of whack. We work too many hours and take on too much responsibility.

Because of that, our family time is compromised, and we miss or hurry through some of the most important moments of our kids’ lives. Worse yet, we miss the messages they send us as they grow — messages that tell us how they feel about themselves, about us and about their world.

Even in those rare instances when we take the time to step back and assess our work as parents, it’s hard to know how we’re doing. That’s probably because we’re looking through the same eyes and thinking with the same brain we use every other day. To get a true picture, we need regular performance appraisals from the experts.

I have recently been reminded again, for maybe the 20th time, that the experts on the matter of how we are doing as parents are with us every day.

Depending on their ages, our kids are either under our feet, in our back seat or on the phone with their friends. They’re the ones who really know. And they will tell us, if we will only listen.

In my home, I am not a very good listener most of the time. There are usually things that my mind can’t put aside at day’s end. My brain is just too tired, and it shifts into autopilot. So I tend not to derive as much as I should from conversations about who did what in school today, when the next tumbling lesson is, what happened at the last one, who won’t be home for dinner and why. And I do not always sense the changing moods and tones of voice that come with the discussion.

Shame on me. Shame on me because folded into those conversations are important messages about how and what my children are doing, whether they’re happy, sad, worried or troubled and why.

I really try hard not to be preoccupied at those times, but my success rate is low; and I suspect I’m not alone. The burdens of the workaday world are heavy, tenacious and play no favorites. So, much of the time, I am in that class of people who has to be hit over the head with blunt, direct information to assure my immediate attention.

One evening last week, my little gift from Brazil did precisely that. This time, the news was good.

She came to me with a short essay she had typed on our new computer. It wasn’t an assignment for school; it wasn’t prompted by anyone else. She just typed it, pasted her picture at the bottom and brought it to me.

This is what it said, misspellings, grammatical mistakes and all:

“My dad: My dad, David V. Miller, is a lawyer at Ziemer, Stayman, Whitsle and Shoulders. He has supported our family extremely well. I love him very much. So does my whole family. Candy, Eric, Brant, Andrew, Ashley Layne and me Sage D. Miller think that he is an amazing father. He worked very hard to get Layne home from Mexico and to get me home from Brazil. We are adopted. I think he is great. I don’t know what I would do without him. I love him very much. By Sage D. Miller.”

I guess she put her school picture with it so I’d be sure to know exactly which Sage D. Miller was the author.

I’ll take her words as a pretty satisfactory report card. I’ve saved it in a place where it won’t get lost.

In the days that followed, Sage’s little essay remained on my mind. I wondered what motivated her to write it.

Maybe she thought I needed to be told that she feels pretty good about things these days. So that’s what she did.

Maybe she knew it would make me feel good. It did.

Maybe she thought I should be hit between the eyes with a progress report, because otherwise it wouldn’t register. She was probably right.

Whatever her motivation, she made me realize that I should have already known how happy and secure she feels. I didn’t.

But if I’d been listening, I probably would have.

So, I resolved again to listen more closely to all the conversation in my house, because if I don’t, the next time the news might not be so good.

In the blink of an eye, Sage will be 15. I have had a teen-age girl in my house once before. They are somewhat different from 10-year-old girls. As a rule, teen-age girls don’t often communicate with their daddies about how things are going, much less provide written reports. They just explode in tears at unpredictable intervals.

So one day in maybe five years, when I am helpless in the wake of yet one more teen-age crisis that I don’t understand, I’m going to get that job assessment out and read it a few times. And after I’m feeling a little better, I am going to show it to Sage and ask her to give me two things — a written update and a hug.

There are at least two things I’ve never forgotten during all these years of parenting and marriage. First: There are some times when all the listening in the world will not help a guy understand what’s bothering a girl, so it might help if she writes it down and lets the guy study it. And second: Hugs from a daddy can make a lot of things better, even when Daddy doesn’t have a clue what the problem is.