Kevin and I drove down to my mom’s place this weekend, so we could spend time with her and my brother and my nephew…and the Gulf of Mexico…
(Me and my nephew, at Navarre Beach, FL)
We stared at it ’til our feet and ankles had disappeared waaay into the sand, and he told me he loved me “deeper than the part of the ocean with sharks in it” that day.
Month. MADE.
And when he reached over to hold my hand during Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs after we got back to my Mom’s place?
Heart. SMITHEREENS.
On the way back from Florida, Kevin and I listened to Diane Sawyer on Oprah Radio’s, “Master Class”. Have you heard/seen that one? I never realized how soothing her voice was until I was just listening to it on the radio. It made me wish I had a more soothing voice. Do kids respond better to soothing voices? I know I didn’t want to stop listening.
One of my favorite parts of Diane’s interview was when she said, “I read once, that this great physicist (who won a Nobel Prize) said that every day when he got home, his Dad asked him not what he learned in school but, ‘Did you ask any great questions today?‘ I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids. That we can be excited by their questions- not by our answers, and whether or not they can repeat our answers.” — Diane Sawyer
Mind. BLOWN.
I LOVE that, don’t you? “That we can be excited by their questions- not by our answers and whether or not they can repeat our answers.”
I felt lucky to have tuned in just seconds before she said it. What a great reminder to be intentional about experiencing the wonder that goes quietly rides along with teaching and learning from each other. Sharon Salzberg once wrote, “Curiosity broadens our world and opens our hearts. It is a way to shift out of being on automatic pilot, so that we can see a situation, a person, or an emotion with fresh eyes”. Here’s to seeing the extraordinary side of ordinary today! #AndEveryDay
Kevin and I have been together for 10 years now. We spent the first couple on the road together, the next few working together at a photography studio, and the last five building e-businesses that have simultaneously Grown and Humbled us in ways we never could’ve imagined. All that to say, we’ve spent a lot of time together. So as you can imagine, we’ve covered almost every topic of discussion you can think of. But it wasn’t until we started talking about turning the two of us, into a three of us (through adoption), that we started to think/talk about how we’d parent a child.
(Kevin, and our neighbor, fishing down the street)
We’ve talked a lot about which parts of our own parent’s parenting styles we want to incorporate into our personal parenting style, and I’m sure it goes without saying that we’ll learn the most about how to best parent our child when we actually become parents, but in honor of my serendipitous satellite-streamed brush with Diane Sawyer this weekend, I thought it would be fun to open up a discussion about your favorite parenting tips and techniques today. If you have any words of wisdom you’d like to share with the folks reading this post, we’d love to hear them! (Mom G, Mom P, and Aunt Chriss- that means you, too!)
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