Water and Flowers

A few weeks ago, I was exhausted before dinner. Handling three kids and a dog is no joke and I was worn out for the day. My kids still had bundles of energy and my 5 year old daughter and 4 year old son wanted to play in the backyard while my wife cooked dinner. I thought why not and let the wildlings out.

They started to pick flowers and thought they needed cups to make bouquets. My wife had just cleaned the cabinets and had miniature cups on the table, so my kids asked permission to use them. We said yes (and honestly I’m surprised they even asked) since we didn’t have a use for those cups and they began to fill them with water and bring them outside.

As you can imagine with young kids, they made a mess. There was water all over the floor and they were walking in and out with flowers they just picked. My wife hates a mess and I have a higher threshold of tolerance for messes, but this was starting to exceed my tolerance. I realized that I was also hangry, so I needed to take a few breaths. It was at that moment that my son asked me to open the door so he could go back outside with the water. It was already such a mess and I had two options - one was to tell them to clean it up and another was to enable them.

I know they were having innocent fun and my kids were getting along well, so I enabled them. I opened the door and my son went outside to get more flowers. They must have made 7-8 bouquets of water cup flowers and brought them all inside. They had a blast and they even got scared because they brought in some bugs on those flowers. We ended up putting all the bouquets in the corner of the table and cleaned up the mess afterwards. Even though I know my wife and I were feeling the mess, I’m glad we refrained from nagging and stopping the fun so our kids could be kids. Worry-free and free.