Have you ever lived through moments that you instantly think back and say, “Hey, I want a do over!” I believe my son, Ryan, has learned this hard knox lesson in life that as much as we can wish a ‘do over’ to take place, it just doesn’t happen.
I took Ryan to get a Wii points card that cost him $20. He used some birthday money that his Mema and Papa gave him early. He is very frugal with his money and it took him awhile to decide that he wanted to use it on this particular item. After we got home from Blockbuster I had left to go help my friend who is opening Jennika’s (on King’s Harbor). I’ve been giving her whatever free time I have to help price items, etc. (Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a lot of time.) We had worked for an hour or two and then decided to go over to Sharky’s for dinner. During dinner I received a phone call from Ryan. He was crying. He had scratched off the silver covering of the Wii points code with a key and it had scratched off the first 3 numbers making the card useless! He is yelling at me that we need to do something about this. I’m in a busy restaurant and can barely hear him but the distress is obvious in his voice. So here is my predicament. This is a lesson learned for him…he shouldn’t have scratched the card so hard that it rendered it void. However, he is expecting me to do something about it! He called back 5 times, eventually getting to the opinion that I should buy him a new one because this is just wrong!
I know he wished he could do that moment over. Go back and use a penny instead of a key and to be gentle instead of rough. I did call a Blockbuster to see what we could do…basically, nothing. I tried to call Nintendo and they are obviously closed. So I told him that we would go try the Blockbuster we bought it from to see if they would replace it…if not then we would call Nintendo on Tuesday. But I have not suggested I’ll just go buy him a new one. Is that wrong?? I hate to see him so upset, and I do know how he feels – oh the frustration! But it is his lesson!! Tell me, I want to know, is that bad parenting???
I live through so many ‘do overs’ in a day. I can’t even keep track of how many times I wish I could take back having said what I said, or looked the way I looked, or said ‘no’ when I should have said ‘yes’, or ‘yes’ when clearly I should have said ‘no’. I think the biggest lesson I’ve received from my own personal ‘do overs’ is learning to live with that feeling that it isn’t the way I want it to be and how do I then make the most of the way it is, and where will life take me because of this mistake. How can I make it better? That is the real challenge in making the mistake, right?
If I never had any ‘do overs’ then I’d never learn anything!!! And even then sometimes it takes me repeating the same ‘do overs’ a few times before it gets through to me!
But as I’ve mentioned several times before…such is the grace that comes from a brand new day. We always get a fresh new 24 hours to start all over again!
🙂
Blessings
Shannon