"We Can Fix This"

A couple weeks ago, I commandeered daughter Cookie's kitchen island for Operation Homework and enlisted kids from grades 2, 3, 5, and 7 to take down the enemy before the bedtime ambush. Although it was a maneuver I had grown rusty at, our mission garnered some modest success over the week and a half I was there, and we enjoyed a lot of good fun and conversation in the process.

On one night in particular, Bootsie (who had celebrated her ninth birthday only a few days before) was going head to head with some grammar, generating some discussion of sentence subjects, direct objects, and the like. Her assignment involved some parsing and diagramming, and she was having a little trouble determining the roles and relationships among nouns in a given sentence. I watched as she wrote an object in the subject spot.

We talked about the different ways verbs work, and how some nouns denote "doers" while others designate "receivers."  She realized her mistake, erased it, corrected it, and looked thoughtfully up at me.

"You know," she said, "some people just say, 'Oh look. You did that wrong, didn't you?'"

"Really?" I asked, thinking she might be referring to me. "What would I say?"

A few seconds of thoughtful silence, and then this: "You would say, 'We can fix this.'" She caught me off-guard.

Right off the top of my head, I can't recall many times when anything anyone said made me feel better than these simple, sincere words from this new nine-year-old. I love that someone might see my efforts in this positive way. I like the thought that someone might look to me for hope, for reassurance, for ways out of tough spots, for companionship when problems need solving.

So here I sit, a full, unprecedented twenty-four days late with birthday-blog wishes for this sweet kid. Although busy may be a reason, it does not hold up as an excuse. There is a problem here, and I must fix this. Now.

Happy birthday, Bootsie. In the chaotic whirlwind that blew in with a new baby brother, you slipped quietly from eight years old to nine. In spite of that, though, there were presents and cake (twice) and lots of good thoughts that were just for you. You got toys, activity kits, and costumes to feed your creative spirit, and I was glad to arrive while the celebration was still ongoing and fresh. I can't wait to return in a few days for Halloween.

Your great-grandma and I are proud to see that you are hand-stitching quilt blocks from these squares of fabric she gave you.

Don't get frustrated, though, if you find a row of stitching that is crooked or coming loose. Don't worry if the pattern doesn't turn out quite like you intended. As you are finding out, everything doesn't always come together smoothly, especially right off the bat. Some of the things you want to accomplish take a lot of time.

So be patient with yourself, and stay positive. Like all of us, you are bound to make a few mistakes along the way. But when that happens, just remind yourself, "We can fix this"-- and then try your best to do just that.