The small, big, of things is you just seriously have to seize your moment. You might be the underdog, you might feel like you won’t matter. But trust me, if you do something as small as just step forward, sometimes you make a big impact.

My two girls, for instance, are highly competitive. In fact, their goal in these few recent years, has been only to get each other’s goat and one-up the other. It makes their play time more productive. It also causes them to think outside the box and be creative and do something incredible that they might not have otherwise done had they not had the drive to out-do the other. It also gives my husband and I some major headaches. But it’s all for the greater good. They are still in discovery-mode with life.

Isla (younger by 17 months) has recently made her small contributions and yet made big impacts. Her sister and her can be picking out outfits from their shared closet and want the same pants. Isla has learned she can quickly grab it from Evy and just take off running like a rocket. She’s tiny, but she has developed  an unsurpassable sprint.  They also fought the other day over making a fort. Evy wanted a specific blanket all to herself. It was plenty big for the two of them, but she wasn’t going to share. Isla got fed up with arguing and took the tiny pillow out from under Evy’s head and suddenly Evy stopped caring about the blanket. My recent all time favorite was when Evy wouldn’t share the signing time on the karaoke machine. She wouldn’t share the microphone, so Isla danced instead. She danced until she heard enough of Evy and then just walked over and disconnected the microphone. She looked over to check her big sister’s reaction as she did this. Isla with all her 21 months under her belt, wanted to do a small but big thing that would get back at her 3 year old sister. And it worked. Evy couldn’t figure out what happened and she was so upset. Isla however, was not sad. She found a way around big sister.

Is it bad when I laugh at these moments?  I do try and make things better, but I can’t help but sit back a moment and separately cheer them each on for what they accomplish. You don’t have to be the big guy to win something. Just do something small.

Thank you for reading.

When it comes to growing and experiencing new things it’s all about trying. Making attempts until you succeed. I recently read an article that talked about all the failures of highly successful individuals like Thomas Edison, Vincent Van Gogh, Steve Jobs and so on. A long list of people that messed up first, but didn’t give up. Some of their “failures” are in the upwards of thousands. Some of their so-called failures were in not being famous until they were passed on from us. No matter which way you dissect a success, make sure no matter what, you at least gave it a handful of attempts.

Try things, at least 5 times. Why 5? It’s just seems like a healthy effort was given, doesn’t it? And, because that’s how many times it took my horrified little Grace to go to the ear piercing parlor until she didn’t run screaming (I’m laughing right now, sorry, that’s awful of me).  She wanted her ears pierced so badly. She was truly obsessing with requests multiple times a day. I would bring her to the ear piercing place and she would watch some other little girl, and she would start screaming. Curdling screams. This trial process of her insistent requests, me driving her there, and then resorting to screams until we left was 4 times. Months went by and I told her, I swore to it in fact, that I would never bring her back to such a thing ever again. Then one day she truly convinced me. Or she wore me down. We went back there one final time, she closed her eyes, and Bang! She had pierced ears. We didn’t revolutionize the world, but she did revolutionized something inside herself – She Did it!

She made it worth it. And she had something amazing to show for it.

There are going to be so many times in our lives when we aren’t sure of the outcome. There will be multitudes of times we fail, and I’m speaking from that experience. It might take 100’s of tries or attempts at something until we succeed or listen to someone’s pleas and we give it a try. Moral of this story is that success always follows failures. It might sting, it might cost you, but you will never know unless you don’t give up.

Grace’s new, 3rd Piercing

Thank you for reading.