Saturday, November 15, 2008

When Things Go Right

I often write about the day to day horrors of having a four year old, twin almost-two-year olds, and being pregnant. Since my goal in this blog is to have a record of life as we live it, I have to be careful that not everything I write is about what goes wrong. I know a lot of it is, but I'm just being honest in my writing. Besides, the bad is a heck of a lot funnier than the good. If I can't laugh at my life, what in the world would I do?

However, yesterday had one of those good moments. The ones where you realize that all of your hard work is paying off, that maybe, just maybe, your kids will turn out all right after all. Emma's pre-school sends notes home every day letting us know how the day went. Since her teachers have become good friends of our family, they know that she is working on getting all of her smileys on her responsibility chart and will help us keep her on track. This is the note that was sent home yesterday.

Emma had a great day. Wonderful, in fact. A new friend in our class was quite sad. Emma introduced herself to this girl, and then spent the entire day trying to keep her cheerful. Emma held her hand, and showed her around. She introduced the girl in everything, and when the girl looked sad, she said, "Don't worry, Mommies always come back, and I'm your friend." What looked like it was going to be a really rough day for the new friend turned out great, thanks to Emma.

I got a call last night as Marty was headed home with her, saying they were going to be late since they were headed to the store to pick out a special treat for Emma, since she had such a great day. They came home and showed me the note, and I have to say, I got tears in my eyes. Emma has such a sweet, caring spirit and to imagine her taking such good care of a scared new friend made me so proud of her. At dinner, I decided I wanted to hear her side of things.

Me: "Emma, How was your day?"
Emma: "Good."
Me: "Was there a new friend today?
Emma: "Ummmm, I think so."
Me: "Miss Kelina sent home a note saying you helped her today. What did you do?"
Emma: "I went to the store with Daddy and picked out candy!"

OK, not quite the response I was looking for, but fine. We talked a while about how proud we were that she took care of the little girl, and how that was showing compassion and Jesus was smiling since he was so happy with her choice. Emma's response? "Yeah, and I got candy!"

Baby steps.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

o.k. I got tears in MY eyes reading this!!!