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What Were You Thinking?
The other night my sister-in-law, Jennifer took her two young daughters to
a ballet performance by a church group in a nearby town. As her young
daughters watched the ballerinas dance and twirl, the youngest daughter
sat up and said, "Aunt Shan can do that!" My sister-in-law laughed and
said, "Really? Have you seen your Aunt Shannon twirl like that?" For a
moment, she wondered if my secret obsession was ballet and her kids had
quietly peeked in on one of my performances staged in my bedroom.
While Jennifer was telling me of the incident my other sister-in-law,
Rachel, sat and listened. While I was listening, my mind was spinning as
to what could have caused this child to perceive that. Suddenly Rachel
said, "While I was carrying Mason the other day, the wind was blowing my
hair and he said, "Mom, you look like Shannon."
Great. Now I'm known to my nieces and nephews as the windblown ballerina
dancer.
A few days later I was visiting a friends house. As we sat there visiting
her two-year-old came in and announced that "the girl was knocking on the
window again". My friend said that her daughter had been scared at night
because she thought she heard a girl knocking on the window. As she
explained the story to me, her daughter interrupted and said, "Did you
hear that knocking?" My friend and I looked at each other. Neither of us
had heard a thing.
What goes through our small children's minds? There are days that I would
love to see the world through the eyes of my children. Everything is
beautiful and exciting from the fresh fallen snow to the horse manure out
in the field. Yet, they have such vivid imaginations. Sometimes they
perceive things to be so real, things that have no reality whatsoever.
Other times thoughts creep into their world and are made real by their
imaginations. Yet there is no one else around who understands it.
This is when we have to stop and think "what do our children see that we
don't want them to?" Our age has blinded us or made us hard to things
that sometimes have a negative effect on our children. The cartoons they
watch that are sometimes violent, the video games they play and the music
we listen to on the radio need to be monitored at all times by us so that
we know that this is what we really want entering their little minds.
Let's remember how fragile our children's minds are, how clean they start
out. Let's try to fill them with good thoughts, good books, good
television. It only takes a little while now to shape their behavior for
a lifetime.
Click here to read other articles by Shannon.
Copyright © Shannon is webmaster to a website that offers Premade Scrapbook Pages that tell interesting facts about the day a person was born or married. Reprinted with permission.
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