Recently, Alexandra taught me a great lesson on patience and persistence that I wanted to share. For her last surgery, I put together a small plastic photo album containing pictures of the most important people in her life so that she could see everyone during what turned out to be a month-long stay in the hospital hours away from our family and friends. Also, after hearing of issues other children have had after this surgery, I wanted to make sure she recognized and remembered all of these people! She still likes to look through it and points out each person in each picture every time she looks through it.
Well the other night, while I was busy in the other room, she decided it would be fun to take out every picture and throw them all on the floor of her bedroom. When I saw the mess, I told her she needed to pick them up. Little did I know that she would lay down on her stomach and actually put each one back into the photo album. She wouldnt even let me help, so I just sat there and watched her for the next 30-40 minutes painstakingly put each picture back into its sleeve. The pages are flimsy, and she would get one corner of one picture in and as she would try to get the second corner in, the first corner would slip out. At times she would get one in only to realize that she got it behind the divider and would have to pull it out and start over. I marveled at how calmly she just kept trying until she got all the pictures back into the photo album.
It made me think about how quickly we all quit things when they turn out to be harder than we anticipated. We give up on our dreams when it takes longer than we want to wait. We never know how close we are to reaching our goals because we give up a moment too soon. Ive certainly been as guilty of doing this as the next person! However, Im making a plan to take a lesson from my three-year old and persevere through whatever challenges are thrown my way until Ive done what I want to do!