Five Minute Friday: Break

Happy Friday, Friends!  Thank you for stopping by for my Five Minute Friday post.  This is the time that I get to join in with writers everywhere for 5 minutes. We start off at katemotaung.com to get our writing prompt, then we write for 5 minutes about that prompt.  No over thinking. No editing.  Just writing.

And here we go!

"Be careful! Don't break that!"

I have found myself saying that over and over again.  I am the mama of three boys. What do you expect?

Kids break things.  I break things.  It happens.

Carson decided one day it would be a great idea to drop kick a ball through the bedroom door.  When he did, the ball hit the squirrel that has been on our wall for 12 years. It belonged to Jeff's grandmother before that, one of the cherished things he kept after she passed away.

Well, the ball hit it. The squirrel fell. It's big tail shattered all over the floor.

Carson's face was full of fear.

I calmed him down. Cleaned it up.  Then went to talk to his daddy.

Jeff handled it better than I thought.  He said he was upset, but he knew what Nanny would have said, "Oh, don't fuss at him. It's ok."

Breaking things can cause us to react in so many ways.  We can be angry, we can laugh it off, or we can talk about it and move on.

Stop.

I'd like to say that I reacted the same way when Colin broke something special of mine.  I didn't. However, I didn't fly off the handle like I had in the past.  I'm learning more and more that things are just things. We will have the memories that go along with them.  How I react to broken things will be remembered too. I want my children to remember that I treated them more importantly than my "stuff."  It was funny telling Carson's story to Jeff's cousin the other day when she wanted to know what happened to the squirrels tail.