Each Wednesday, I'll post a picture or two or three or an entire photo bomb from some event or special day or just special moment in our lives that I otherwise haven't gotten around to blogging about, and tell you a little about why that event/day/thing was so magical. . . .
Here goes number 1, which most definitely ranks as one of my top 10 most favorite pictures, ever:
This picture makes my heart smile BIG and my eyes glisten with tears (the happy kind) every time I see it. In 2011 when we decorated our Christmas tree, B helped Sam stand to decorate and let her sit in a chair at the bottom of the tree to help decorate. At the time, we'd just started talking about getting her a gait trainer, and as we decorated the tree, I told B, "think of how great it would be if we already had a gait trainer . . . she could stand and decorate by herself." Two gait trainers (first a pacer, then a kidwalk) and over a year later, we had a little girl who was still mostly resistant to using the gait trainer, a source of (to be honest) a little bit of frustration for me and B. Mostly because we knew she could do it, but because she, frankly, wasn't interested, and we so, so, so wanted her to want it. We'd suggest her getting in it, she'd adamantly say "no," and we rarely pushed. Occasionally, we'd tell her she could only watch Dora if she stood in her gait trainer, and she would, but she'd just stand. We tried evening "dance parties" with her in the walker, and music blaring, but she wasn't all that jazzed. Ever. We didn't push much further than that. We just didn't want it to be a forced thing, a negative, or worse . . . a source of frustration for her.
And then we got out the Christmas decorations this last Christmas, and B said, "hey Sam, want to get in your walker so you can stand next to Mia and decorate?"
And she said yes.
Yes.
Just like that.
And after decorating, she spent an hour in her gait trainer, chasing her sister around the living room. And since then, she asks to go in her walker nearly every day. She says, "I want to chase Mia," to which we say, "do you want to use your walker," and she says yes.
YES! YES! YES!
At least once a week, B or I text each other a picture of our girl moving and grooving in her kidwalk, and I know without even seeing his face, he beams when he gets them, as do I.
One day, he replied to one of those pictures: "I'm so glad we didn't push her. That we never forced it."
Me too.
She didn't need to be pushed.
She just needed to come to it on her own. With a little motivation from our tiniest girl. A great big gift from Sammie B's little sister. A little sister that so willingly lets her big sister chase her.
Be still my heart.
2 comments:
Love, love, love this. It's so hard to know when to push them to do things you know they can do and when to let them just be. We struggle with that all the time. WTG Mia for being the motivation that Sammie needed, these kiddos are lucky to have such great siblings and the siblings are lucky to have them.
Beautiful!
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