After another long shift at work, I peered into the dog food bowl. My two-year-old had used his toy bulldozer to move the food around.
The next day, he was at it again. It’s cute I thought. Then I heard a loud crunching sound come from his mouth.
“Are you eating dog food?” I asked with a bit of a laugh.
“Yes,” he mumbled with a mouth full of food.

As yucky as that moment was, I treasure times like those, where I interact with my kid and something pretty cool, disgusting or otherwise happens.
I recently climbed onto the roof of my house to make an emergency roof repair. I made it up, made the repair and looked down. This was not good. I am afraid of heights and was high up. After being scared for a while and waiting for my husband to stabilize the ladder more, I made my way down. My legs were shaking so much, the entire ladder moved as I descended.
I don’t want to climb on a roof again, but the view was amazing. I’ll never forget the sense of pride I had after I made the repair.
Little moments can easily turn into big moments. Whether they are happy, sad or angry depends on your reaction.
In the case of my son’s dog food incident, I could have reacted out of anger and freaked out my kid. He’s been told a million times not to eat the dog food. I think he reinterprets it as “eat as much dog food as you want.” He’ll still eat it if I don’t watch him, so why punish him?
Jon Acoff says in ablog post about failure there are two types of failure: the unavoidable and the preventable. The most important thing is to be proactive to stop preventable failure. Each time, we fail we should learn from it.
I’ve had a lot of failures, especially in regards to raising my kids and getting into shape.
But each moment is a chance to learn and grow. I know that each moment with my kids is a gift. I should make the most of it and not dwell on how to prevent my kids from failing as I did so often. If they don’t fail or succeed on their own, how will they grow?
Also each time I lace up is a chance to do something I haven’t done before. Who knows what you can do if you try hard enough?