Learning Definitions and Creating Our Own

This boy. This sweet, sweet boy. 

Oh my first born son, how smart and friendly and awesome he is.

Oh how he had me so frustrated yesterday.

I was not going to yell. I spent the day doing household stuff, grocery shopping, hanging out with the little ones, watching The Chew and pouring out into a blog post and I was feeling lighter. Maybe fresher, a new start for the day. Then Dylan got home from school and we all made snacks. Things were fine and normal when suddenly the whiney monster came out. Dylan spent the good part of an hour in and out of his room for whining about every.little.thing. His legs hurt, he had too much homework, his brother wouldn't let him have a moment to himself, he couldn't play the Wii, he didn't get to help make the Cranberry Bog Bars. I was seriously on the verge of losing it and I couldn't figure out what was actually wrong or why he was having such a hard day, but he was.

Eventually with time he calmed down and helped me make dinner. "This is my favorite dinner now. Well pizza is here" holding up a hand as a level, "and this is here" holding his other hand equally high. We got through out difficult time and I tried to hold it together. I did the best I could and you know what happened? Magic!

He saw a magazine on the counter, Thriving Family published by Focus on the Family. I got a free subscription (I think all subscriptions are free but I found it through some sort of promotion) a while ago and it has so great ideas and articles so I had it there to remind me to talk to Shane about something in it. He tried to read the title and couldn't quite pronounce the word thrive. I helped him and then he asked me what it meant. I explained that it meant to do really well or to keep growing better. Then we looked it up in the dictionary to keep that learning active (who's with me mommas?) and found it was related to the word flourish. So of course we had to look that word up too. Once we were all done researching I sort of dropped the subject and moved on to cleaning up after dinner when he came up to me and said, "You know that thing we were talking about earlier, that's like our family right now." 

Oh be still my heart. After a rough day this boy thinks our family is thriving. You know what? He's right. I did struggle through the surviving stage and couldn't wait to get to the unattainable thriving stage. When I finally stopped to look around I realized I was actually there, with the help of a small and sometime whiney voice.