Last week I was swimming with my kids and my three-almost-four year old had this very concerned look, and in a voice worthy of pity and sadness, she said:

“aaaaaaaw, look at that water down there,” as she points down to the bottom of the pool, with serious concern, “it’s drowning .”

In all my years I’ve never thought about the water on the bottom, drowning.  How ignorant of me :p

Today was an interesting walk. I walked 6.3 miles, which is the most I can stand to do since my boss doesn’t like me to take 2 hour lunch breaks :p

About 3 miles into it a neighbor who knows what my goal is honked like a crazy woman and then pulled up beside me and yelled encouragement… thumbs up and everything.  That was pretty cool (thank you ).

Then, about a half mile up the road I was at an intersection waiting to cross when an older guy (about 60), pushing a stroller with a baby, came up to me and said “I walked every day for an hour, cut 1/2 of what I ate and cut out the soda and I lost 23 pounds!  Don’t give up!”

That was really nice of him to share.  Of course it reminded me that even though I feel 100 times better, I still look like I need to lose 23 pounds :p

Here’s my favorite story, though.  This happened 8 days ago. I was with my 9 year old son (the romantic one LOL).  He is a very active kid but this winter he hasn’t been so active… so he would ride his bike ahead of me just so he could take a lot of rests.

When we were about 3.5 miles into the walk, which was about .5 miles from our house, I told him I was going to pass our house and walk another 2.3 miles.  I knew he was exhausted and really just wanted to get a reaction out of him.

He said, with a really calm face, “that’s okay.” — no discouragement at all.

I said “really?”

He replied, and this was the BEST part: “sure Dad, I don’t care.  I just want to make sure you hit your goal.”

He was thinking of ME hitting MY goal.  What an awesome 9 year old!

It was a very tender moment – I sure love my kids!

Last night Kim threw up on my bed after too much playing and laughing.

About an hour later, as I was putting her to bed, I asked her:

Does your tummy feel yucky?

She replied, with a grin:

No, my tummy feels yummy!

Along the path to becoming better parents we came across Nicholeen Peck’s stuff, which is best summarized as “teaching self government” to kids.

The idea is to help kids understand how they can govern themselves, their actions, their emotions, etc.  I’ve blogged about Nicholeen here and here.

One of the things she teaches us is how we can teach our kids to “accept a ‘NO’ answer.”  That is, when they ask something, and we say no, they can respond by saying OK with (a) a calm face and (b) a calm voice and then (c) dropping the subject.

If you think about it, it’s a brilliant thing to learn (many adults need to learn this).  Of course, they can “disagree appropriately,” also, so it’s not all about accepting our NO.

Usually when our 3 year old asks a question and we say NO, she is thrilled to say okay in that way. And then she immediately says “dad, I accepted a no answer with a calm face and a calm voice!” with the cutest smile and sense of pride you can imagine.  It’s really cute.

A few days ago she said something equally cute… we also hope our kids make right decisions… even though nobody always makes right decisions we want them to know they can CHOOSE to make a good (or right) decision – they are empowered to make decisions that will impact the consequences.

The three year old was talking to my wife and said very simply, and with a very serious face:

“I  choose the right, not the left“

It was good to hear her clarify that she had made a right decision, not a left decision :p