One thought, two thoughts, old thought, new thoughts

Today is a day to celebrate in the Brown household. Justin read his first book...One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. He's been able to read individual words for quite awhile and got a fun LeapFrog game for Christmas that's really helped his reading to blossom, but today is the first time I've sat down with a book that I was confident he could read and he did. Sentence after sentence, page after page. It's an occasion to celebrate, and celebrate we did.

But it also highlights a nagging concern I have about his character, and sadly, what I might be doing as a parent to contribute to it. It would be my hunch that Justin could've read weeks or months ago except that he wasn't sure he could and wasn't willing to try. He brought home a boat to decorate for a race at AWANA and decided that he wasn't going to participate because he didn't know if he would win (BTW: He WILL participate). I could understand this self-consciousness developing in a 12 year old, but at barely five he's at a time in his life where he should be trying out all sorts of things just to see what he likes and what he's good at. The values that I want him to have apparently aren't the ones he's picking up, and the more I look at my own life the more I see maybe where he gets it. So I'm setting a new goal, one that's strange and uncomfortable, to intentionally do things that I probably won't succeed at and try to act convincingly like it's fun. I'm going to make an effort to point out my failures whenever they happen and deal with them gracefully without excuses. And I'm going to pray that the lesson is learned quickly. But no matter the temporary humiliation I will have to go through, it will be better than looking back and thinking that maybe I failed in some way as a parent by allowing him to think that he has to be perfect. So here's to big, glaring failures in my life in the weeks to come! (How often do you wish for that?!)