He wanted the water too.

I do things Kiddo4 doesn’t understand, but I never realize the disconnect until he says something. For example, while I made him juice one day, he said, “You have to put water under the juice.”

I water down his juice because he drinks it by the gallon and no one needs that much sugar. Kiddo4 thnks of it as a layering process, like a drink parfait.

Last week, though, he looked into the bottom of his mug and said, very sadly, “I wanted to drink the water too.”

I was helpless with laughter (well, trying to stifle the laughter) for about a minute. How do you explain this to a child? He doesn’t want to drink straight-up water, but having water underneath the juice is fine and exciting.

He got the good things he wanted. He got his juice and he got his water, but they weren’t the way he expected them to come, and so he was disappointed.

It feels like there’s a lesson in there somewhere, that we receive blessings in our lives all the time and fail to see we’ve received them at all because they didn’t come the way we were looking for. I blogged about something similar on QueryTracker yesterday, how we can feel like failures in the very act of succeeding because we’ve defined success the wrong way. Maybe truth is seeing things for what they are, not waiting for the things we expected to find.

The Kiddo doesn’t want to drink straight water. I don’t understand why, because he will gladly drink water from a bottle, and if I put water into the lemonade pitcher, he’ll drink that too. But that isn’t water: it’s lemonade without lemon or sugar. Again, definitions. I’ll gladly never make lemonade again if he’ll drink water from that pitcher.

As an adult, then, I wonder what good things I pass by because they came in the wrong container or because they came mixed with something else. And as a mother, I wonder how to teach my Kiddos not to make that mistake.