Some of you may know that I'm a black and white kind of person...very little room for gray in my life. There's fair and unfair. There's right and wrong. There's good and bad. And there's one right way to do things.
While I consider myself to be fairly self-aware, I don't think you notice the full extent of these tendencies until you see those same things in your children. Yikes.
I've started to notice that Torin likes things done a specific way. Hmmm...wonder where he gets that from?
And I've noticed that I can tend to lose patience when he wants to do things his own way. Like this morning. We sat down to do a math puzzle on the floor. There are 30 pieces which make 3 different puzzles by matching the color on the bottom of the piece and then putting all the green pieces in order from 1 to 10.
But Torin didn't want to do it that way. He wanted to mix the colors and then he wanted to put all three 10s together. I found myself getting frustrated and telling him that wasn't the right way to do it. I didn't want to do it his way and he clearly didn't want to do it my way.
There are times when my way matters and it's worth the fight...for safety, respect or other character developing reasons. But there are times when it really doesn't matter. I just need to let him be a kid and figure things out for himself. Let him do things his way. Let him be creative.
Most times I think I have more to learn than he does.
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