Parenting skills at their finest!

   A recent stroll down memory lane had me looking at photos of my daughter from over the years.

A number of things went through my head...

When the heck did this kid get so tall? She is now about as tall as me!

Will I ever be able to keep up with her pant size?

What is her pant size these days?

Are those pants she is wearing in the picture?

How did she come to own so many cool shoes?

Will she notice if I start borrowing her shoes?

   But mostly I wondered, how did we make it this far?  How did she survive with us as parents? After all, we are the ones who decided having children might not be so bad after someone had come to visit with their well behaved children. Suddenly having little ones seemed like a good idea. Parents we knew didn't seem all that more skilled than us, so how hard could it be? Oh, to be sooo naive.

refusing to do slide

   Now mind you, we weren't totally clueless when it came to children. We had been around lots of youngsters. Tended to lots of kid of all ages. And all them in our care had survived. Even the ones that sometimes didn't behave very well. We felt we knew quite a bit about kids. We could totally handle this!
 
   After our daughter was born, one of our first hurdles was the park. We knew kids liked parks. So early on, we took our daughter to the park. At first, she didn't seem to like it very much. She wouldn't sit in the swing. She didn't climb the monkey bars. She totally refused to do the slide. We were both kinda baffled by this, as the children we had encountered seemed to like swings, monkey bars and especially slides. We wondered if the problem was the park we had chosen. Later we learned that it was a wardrobe issue. We had not dressed her in the right outfit for a park outing!

Silly us!

     Our vast experience had also taught us that children liked cars. So we got her one.

   But then, next thing we knew, she wanted a space in the garage. We had no idea that driving was going to be such a struggle at such an early age! As if it were not bad enough that our yard had grown enough plastic items for an army of kids and our house was overrun with toys, now our garage was being taken over by the smallest member of our family!
 
   We were in the process of adding her to our auto insurance when someone mentioned to us that kids aren't supposed to drive, at least not until they are sixteen or so. We began to wonder if this applied to other things....

Like navigating commercial boats?

It was the captain's idea to let a two year old pilot a boat full of passengers.

   Or driving a horse and buggy carriage?

Hey, she was five...

Look how well she handled the reins!

   Certainly we thought letting her fly and airplane was a good idea...

Well, the pilot thought so, and if he was okay with her flying his plane, so were we!

   We were even game for her flying without a plane...

Don't be so shocked. It's not like we let her jump out of an airplane or anything!

   After all, we wanted our daughter to experience many things. Though it became evident that our "vast" experience had not quite taught us all we probably needed to know to be good parents, we did not give up in our efforts. It became our mission to involve her in all the activities that we enjoyed, like hiking and biking, boating, and camping. 

What can go wrong when you got a cool carrier like this?

   Well, I suppose there was that one time when we got to the top of the mountain and she wanted out to stretch. While she was stretching with Daddy, I took some pictures. Well I thought she was stretching with Daddy. He thought she was playing with me, so he was video-taping. And getting bored, she decided that she would climb over the railing for a better look. Oops. Thank you stranger who had her by the shirt! We felt pretty foolish!

   But not foolish enough to stop us years later from visiting Mt. Rushmore. At night. With an electrical storm heading our way....  Perhaps that was a questionable decision. I had to admit when the fireman's walkie-talkie started spouting warnings, I did get a little nervous. Maybe it is just us and mountains. We probably should stay out of the mountains. Otherwise, we seem to make pretty good decisions as parents. 

Take hiking for example. She started at an early age.

Clothes optional, of course. Although we generally insisted on shoes.

   Well, usually...

And if she got too tired to hike, we were right there to help her out!

Don't worry, I got her.

I think.

Maybe I should not mention our adventures in biking and climbing and boating...
Which brings me back to my original question, how did she survive? How did we get this far?

Perhaps it was the helping hands we received... There were a myriad of wonderful people who helped us along the way. Some a little younger, true.... But we were not quick to judge experience based on size. Our nephew was a great babysitter.

Or maybe it was the new people we met along the way (Kate was good at introductions, as well as stealing hats). These folks had tons of experience traveling with kids and gave us some terrific advise that we used for years!

   Then again, it could have been the emergency response teams that have entered our lives...

   I like to think some of how we arrived at the present was our parenting skills. We were adamant about giving her tasks early on, instilling a sense of responsibility at an early age. It could be she grew into the young woman she is today because we helped her develop the skills she needed.

   

Or possibly it was that we were relaxed in our way of handing things and from us she learned how to relax and take it all in.

  Then again,  it may not have been our parenting skills at all.

Who is driving the buggy?

  However we arrived at this place and time, I thank God. I pray that he continues to help us in our journey as our daughter continues to develop and grow.

   I also pray that she doesn't notice that we are pretty much the same shoe size...