Life Lessons from a Five Year Old

Every now and then, my kids come up with a life lesson that is so rich and so utterly unexpected, you’d never find it in a book.

So my 5yo comes up to me and asks me, “Momma? When are you going to teach us wisdoms?” PUh!okayyy, what? So I respond, “Um, that’s an interesting question, why are you asking me that?” as I sit down on the the couch and invite my two girls to sit on my lap.

“Well, because, in the Little Foot movie, they were teaching their kids wisdoms and I want to know when you’re going to teach US wisdoms!”

“All right, well, do you know what wisdom is?”

She says, “It’s to protect you in life because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

I say, “Hmmm. Well I guess that’s part of it but the rest of it is that Wisdom is found in how you use the knowledge you have.”

I decide to give her an example. “A few minutes ago, you came downstairs and asked me why your sister was crying. I explained about the fact she was disappointed over the fact that there wasn’t any more pizza and that you had the last piece. Now, you could have done two different things with the knowledge you now had. You could have teased her and said, ‘Nya, nya, boo, boo, I got the last piece!’ but instead, you thought about it and gave her the rest of the slice you had. This way you shared it with her. Doing that was using wisdom. In fact, I’m very pleased with your doing that!”

She grinned from ear to ear and then said:

“Awesome! I found it in the garbage!”

0.o Right.