Learning with and from my daughter!

  

The other day when we were at the sports center playing with a group of young girls, Hailey came up to me and said, “Mom, I think that since we live here in Mexico and everyone has black hair, I should have black hair too.  I wish I had black hair.”  It was so sweet!  I told her that everyone here in Mexico loves to touch her hair and wishes they had blond hair!!!  This gave us such a great chance to talk about being thankful for who God has made us, and loving how He has designed each of us!  And also recognizing how different He has made people, and how beautiful the differences are and learning to celebrate these differences!  Life long lessons I’m still learning!!!

Hailey has such a sweet and generous spirit.  If anyone comes to our house, she wants to make them something.  She loves to color pictures and “write” cards for people.  A week or so ago a family from church came for lunch and Hailey wanted to make them a “book.”  She used about 4 large pieces of paper and made a “book” of sorts for them.  The woman was a bit shocked, I think.  She was grateful, but she flipped through the several pages and asked if it was all for her.  So, I shared with Hailey that many people don’t have lots of paper to color on, and so that maybe we should learn to make cards just of a single sheet of paper, or even a half piece of paper—in order to be sensitive to others.  She quickly said, “Mom, if they don’t have paper, why don’t we just go buy them some? We should do that—then they would have paper to color on.”  It was such a great time of talking with my daughter about “things” and “possessions” and about how to be sensitive to the culture here.  It was a good reminder to me of the truth that just giving people “things” or money is not the answer!  Especially here, that isn’t the solution, even though for us it seems like an easy answer and something we can “do.”  We also talked about being thankful for what we have and good stewards of what God has given us—not wasting things, even if it is a simple piece of paper. 

It is so fun to see our kids learning life lessons here!  They are seeing things and learning things that I could never teach them.  Lord, give me grace as we parent our kids here and learn life lessons together!