Notes

"Your skin looks weird--it looks like it has a bunch of holes in it. My doesn't. It looks smoother." --the kid. The joys of motherhood. 

Last night, the toddler cried at the drop of a hat about everything for more than an hour. At first I thought it was tantrums, so I sent him to the next room to cry. When it persisted, I turned to cuddles, and he sat on my lap to eat his cantaloupe, which was all he would agree to eat for dinner. Finally it came out, "I'm going blind," he sobbed. "I have something behind my eye." 

It turns out that after a bump in the eye when he and another student collided in the play area, a teacher told some story about something happening to her eye. The toddler misunderstood and thought she was telling him that he would go blind. Unlike the kid, who tells me what is wrong in mere moments, the toddler holds things in. We talked about it for a while and convinced the toddler that he is not going blind, and then he was fine for the night and the next morning. 

***

I've been doing more self-reflection recently, and I think the main thing about me is that I have a lot of grit. But the problem with grit is that you don't always know when to let up, give up, change course, etc. And I think that this is a problem that I can see in my teaching, parenting, relationships. Learning flexibility is my goal.