As I sit back with my photo albums and reminiscence over the years gone by I think,
WHAT KIND OF PARENTS DID THIS KID HAVE?
I was quite sure when we brought her home from the hospital that we thought we knew what we were doing. After all, it wasn't the first time we had ever been around kids. We were rather savvy at the hospital and the staff was convinced that this child wasn't our first.
But after leafing through a few pages in the album, I began to wonder how we got this far.
It seems as though we had some rather questionable ideas about parenting. And our little bundle of joy wondered about those ideas as well. Not daunted in the least by our early efforts, we continued to expose our daughter to all the things in life that we loved the most. Especially our love of the outdoors. That is where she discovered things like mountain climbing...
I swear, we only let her out of the backpack at the top of the mountain for two minutes. How were we to know a baby can scale fence in 1.5 seconds??? Thank heavens for the young man who grabbed her by the back of the shirt before she vaulted the railing....
Having learned from this adventure, we thought perhaps she should be introduced to safer pursuits. Like piloting a boat... The captain thought it was a good idea to let a two year old behind the wheel of a commercial watercraft carrying twenty passengers on Lake Jackson, so hey, why not!
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
As parents, we are firm believers in encouraging curiosity...
Checking stuff out and trying new things...
Which led us to the occasion when we let her drive a horse and carriage. What parent could refuse to let their five year old take the reins of a horse and carriage down a major thoroughfare in a city? Surprisingly, she handled traffic quite well.
It hadn't occurred to us that other parents didn't do this.
We are also the same parents who considered it a terrific idea to send our daughter up in a single engine aircraft to try her hand at flying just after she turned seven. With her usual sense of adventure, she was eager to give this a whirl, so again we thought, why not? Once in the air, she was thrilled to be given control of the plane to navigate the sky. It never occurred to us that we hadn't met anyone else that let their kids do this.
Speaking of flying, a few years later we were the same parents who thought it would be okay to let her fly without the aircraft. To our credit, we didn't let her jump out of an airplane...
I am still not sure how we managed to make it this far in our parenting journey. But having arrived at the teenage years with all her limbs attached, I figure we might as well forge ahead to the next chapter. Perhaps, having honed our skills over the last thirteen years, we may yet prove to be good parents.
Wonder if it is too early for driving?
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