The other day I was doing fuse beads with my 3 year old son. It was a Cars themed fuse bead set that he was really excited about. We had been spending a few nights putting together the blue Lightning McQueen and we were close to being done. My 5 year old daughter walked into the play room and asked if she could help. Of course my 3 year old son said yes and we were a trio trying to finish things up.

One of the first tricky things about this fuse bead set is that there were three shares of blue. It would be fine if the shades of blue were drastically different, but this was no ordinary situation. The dark blue was very similar to the “regular” blue to the point where you needed hawk eyes (and maybe a little OCD) to see the difference. It was something my son and I struggled with for the first few days putting together the blue Lightning McQueen set. This is some thing that my daughter did not realize took practice and some experience because she has done tons of fuse bead patterns at school. She was an expert!

When she first started to pick out the dark blues, she was actually picking out the “regular” blues. My son was correcting her each time in a very gentle way, but each correction gave my daughter the blues (pun intended). She felt very discouraged and when I was trying to help her see the difference, she didn’t want the help and left the room.

What I didn’t know at the time was that she went to talk to my wife about it. My wife was explaining that there is nothing wrong with her eyes and that she was fine the way that she was (even though she feels different because she wears glasses and my son does not). After a little talk with my wife, she comes back into the play room.

At this point, I didn’t know what happened, but I was eager to explain the differences to her related to all the shades of blue. I pulled out examples of each shade of blue and showed her the small differences. I also reminded her that my son and I have had many extra days of practice and experience discerning the shades of blue and that I knew she could figure it out if she had some practice and experience. Giving her a confidence boost and reminding her that she didn’t need to be perfect the first time she was doing something helped a lot. She was able to then dive right in and sort out all the dark blues. In fact, that’s all she did for the next 10 minutes and she was an expert at the shades of blue at the end of the night.

While these are maybe small moments in a child’s life, these small moments definitely continue to add up. That’s why I try to make sure that I stay engaged and attentive to my kids as best as I am able to (and I am not perfect at that, but I do try my best, which is what I tell my kids to do!). With each additive moment, I hope my kids will develop the right demeanor to tackle life and all the challenges along the way.