December 2001

My daughter turned five last month. I feared the gimmies would begin last summer as she tends to want everything she sees (wonder where she picked that up?!). But something bizarre, yet quite nice, happened instead.

Somewhere along the line, literally 5 or 6 months before her birthday, every time we were in any kind of store, she would see something she liked and would ask if that item could be on her birthday list. Where she got this concept, I have no idea. At first, I doubted it would stick. But then I noticed that each trip to the store would bring a peaceful shopping venture with a few requests of birthday list additions. I could handle this!

One day, however, after she asked to add a bag of rice to her precious list, I pointed out that that list of hers was sure getting pretty long, and with three months to go until the beloved day, that maybe we should put it down on paper when we got home. Her response jolted me a bit – "No, Mommy, we don’t need to write it down…"…tapping her finger against her head, she continued…"I’ve got it all right here."

Okay – yikes! I was so banking on the fact that once she left the store each time, everything she had just asked for was magically falling off the imaginary list. But now she was assuring me that it was all taken care of. Oh grand!

All this to say – our kids are not only smarter than we give them credit for, they may even be smarter than us from time to time. So today I urge you to take a few steps back and just see what you might be able to learn from them.