Today, he stands.
Holding onto the coffee table, my unhurried child pulls up onto two little feet, flexing ten little toes more accustomed to “This Little Piggy” than to balance, and tentatively lets go. He wobbles for a second, finds his center, and starts forward: pit-pat, pit-pat. But he’s too far from the next point of support, so he sinks to sitting. And as Big Brother shrieks, “Good job, little boy!” he shows all five of his teeth in a smile that could light up Las Vegas.
Despite his small size, the doctor’s dependence on growth curves and insistence on endocrine tests, despite his meandering pace through the developmental milestones, he walks. After the spot-on-time forward charge of the first child and the eighteen-month concentrated effort it took to teach the second, my third child simply decides it’s time. And without fuss, without drawing attention, he walks.
And it warms a mother’s heart.
What is your motherhood moment this week?
Beautiful.
My husband and I took our daughter to the park one evening to play. We are NOT helicopter parents, but when I heard my child’s voice shout “SHUT UP!” from the third level of the play area, I got up to go mediate. My husband stopped me and said to let it go — we don’t know what transpired at the top. If it happened again, well, that’s different. A few minutes later she was down on the “mushrooms” and another mom was helping her across. When she reached solid ground, Eva turned and said “Thank you!”
So when we got back in the car, I told her I wanted to talk to her about two things that I heard, one was good and one was bad. Which did she want first? She said “Bad”. So we talked about the “Shut up”. She explained that another kid had “said something terrible” to her new friend. Wow. My kid is defending her friends. 😀 Nevertheless, I explained that there were kinder ways to do the same thing. “Please don’t say that” or “That wasn’t nice” etc. She cut me off mid-sentence and asked “What was good?” (Little stinker!) I smiled and said how happy it made me to see her good manners with others. She beamed.
Play is the work of children, and sometimes they surprise us with the skills they acquire while hard at play/work.
Nice moment, Andrea. 🙂