Leafy Sea Dragon at the Steinhart Aquarium...the coolest thing I saw there. I am enchanted by these creatures.
Today should have been a pretty fun day for our kids. We have guests visiting from out of town. We had decided to visit the Steinhart Aquarium, but our family had to leave a little earlier than our friends because our oldest daughter is participating in a social skills "Summer Camp", there are no excused absences, and it isn't cheap (though I think it has been worth the money). After that we shared a BBQ dinner and a late swim with our friends before returning home. It was a long day, not very routine, but still, fun! Right?
Well, even though I explained the days events to the child, and the aquarium was truly among the most amazing places we've been to as a family, she did not enjoy much about the aquarium. This bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why she was so eager to leave. At every turn, "Let's go back to the elevator." Was her way of saying: I'm done with this place, I want to move on.
Yet - she didn't want to move on to her class, even though it's been a good experience for her so far. She really wanted to go home, and tried several lines of reason (all rather humorous) for why we should go home. In the end when we arrived at her class she didn't really resist it, she behaved well throughout the class. There were many reasons she could have lost it, but she didn't. My weary Mommy brain kept trying to puzzle out why she wanted to go home. After class it was kind of the same deal. "Why are we eating here? Where are our friends eating? Are they going home before we do?"
We ate, we swam, I had set up some cookies and decorating supplies to occupy the kids while we cleaned up our dinner, but the child declared she wanted her cookie at home. Suddenly I realized what was going on. We had to take two vehicles to the aquarium this morning, and my husband decided it would be fun to divide into boys and girls since between the two families these are evenly split. He even went so far as to move our son's car seat to the other car so he could be one of the boys. This turned out to not be a great idea, but that is a different story for a different time...In any case our daughter was disappointed that she couldn't ride in our friend's car, so we told her she could ride in their car, "ON THE WAY HOME." Hello?? All day long where did she want to go? HOME! This seems almost ludicrous in my logical adult brain...all of these fun activities that she only marginally enjoyed because she spent most of the day wondering when she was going HOME so she could ride in a new car (always exciting!) Would the whole day have been that much more fun if we had just let her ride "with the boys"? Gotta wonder.
It did make me realize that I need to be sure she has a shorter term "exciting thing" to look forward to. A promise for something happening at the end of the day is not beneficial to the early part of the day.
It also makes me wonder how many times I'm looking forward to "something" that is so far down the road that I let it make the present look bad, even though it might be really good. At least God understands better than I did today, but how much more would I enjoy life if I didn't look so far into the future?
