Had lunch with an old friend, Jon Landy, a while back and we got to talking about our kids.
"You know, it's not so much the formal education that I think about with them, it's the little things. From the 'stop and smell the roses' to how to throw a baseball."
How to impart your accumulated wisdom into your children is a big question. Which is why, the other day, I was very excited to see how Paco and Tonka had picked up some of them.
The NFO had a late night, so I got up with all 3 of them. I was feeling pretty sore and muscles were tight, but in thinking about my day, I couldn't see when I'd have some time to do some yoga.
So, since my kids tend to take their time eating breakfast, I said, "what if I take Gianni downstairs and do yoga while you guys are eating breakfast?"
Then, Paco said, "what if we eat at the table in the basement with you?"
And Tonka added, "and if we finish breakfast before you finish yoga, we'll just play nicely together!"
Now, longtime readers of this blog know that the kids can only eat in the dining room or kitchen unless we are watching football, in which case they can eat in the den...
But, it seemed like a good idea, so they had yogurt and cereal while I did yoga in the basement.
It showed me that they could think creatively, collaborate to a win-win scenario, and thought in terms of the Power of the "And."
The very next day, the kids had executed brilliantly in terms of getting ready. We had 30 minutes before we had to leave, so they proposed "can we go out and ride our bikes?"
I let them, which set the stage for the next few mornings of "deferred gratification" education.
I don't have an answer for Jon of how you actually go about planning for these lessons, but I suppose that, as the moments come up, it is our job as parents to extract the larger point from the small example.