Sweetness from my children

I love that my children are starting to turn around and be sweet and caring toward me. A baby can feel empathy, and may look at you with big googly eyes of love, but an older child can express their love in many ways.

On the crazy day, that I described in my last post, we stopped at the coffee shop for breakfast. The options for gluten free were cupcakes with lots of frosting or muffins. Of course, the kids wanted cupcakes, but I told them they had too much sugar for breakfast. The barrista, very sweetly and trying to be helpful, offered that they carry a breakfast cookie (she thought the name "cookie" would appeal more to my kids). She even got out their book to read off all the ingredients in the cookie to me to make sure the kids could eat it. So I bought two of those cookies.

Well, neither child liked the cookie. Hypatia was very upset and threw hers down in the car and refused to eat it. Carbon took a couple bites, said "it's not so bad, I like it" and then tucked it into his lunch box.

That night, when I was washing out his lunch box, the cookie was still in it. I said "Carbon, you didn't eat your cookie", and he answered "I didn't want to hurt your feelings any more right then, but I really didn't like that cookie".

He didn't want to hurt my feelings anymore.



Another example:

Last night Hypatia woke up in the middle of the night with a nightmare. Her dad was up, working, but I got up also to go put her back to bed. As I was lying in bed with her, rubbing her back, she calmed down and said "you should go back to bed, Mommy. Tomorrow we have to go to work and you need energy".