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Improvising



My oldest daughter, Braelynn, wants a horse. She built out a budget to chart out the expected costs. She created a work plan to save for the horse. She even produced a four-page proposal, highlighting the benefits of horse ownership and explaining why a horse would be good for our family. The amount of work and planning she put into this was beyond impressive.

Despite her effort and enthusiasm, I still said “no.” Now, I won’t go into detail about how Brae has turned friends and family against me in her quest to procure a horse, including but not limited to enlisting my own mother to clip out horse ads for her from the classifieds (yes, my mom is one of 17 people in Anchorage who still get the paper). But I will say she and her siblings, determined to be reasonable and cooperative I’m sure, came up with a compromise: a dog. While I did think they were going in the right direction at least in the size of the desired pet size, I explained to them we didn’t need anything else peeing and pooping everywhere as their new brother does a fine job of that on his own. Again, I said “no.”

I figured the conversation would come up again, but at least for the moment I thought I had put it to rest until I came home the other day and found Braelynn with leashes on the two middle kids, walking/trotting them around the house like ponies. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was improvising: if I wasn’t going let her have a horse, she would “train” my own children for dressage, which I think is some kinda horse dancing or something.

Given the fact she had a string tied around my son and daughter’s necks, I took this to be somewhat of a thinly veiled threat (don’t worry, she has since developed harnesses for them). But I also wondered to myself, when do we as adults lose this undying sense of resilience and improvisation? At what point do we allow ourselves to be relegated to that proverbial box? Braelynn would rather have a real horse for sure, but she was determined to still employ the horse training drills she had learned on Youtube and keep up her horse whisperer skills despite not actually having access to a horse. Even when things don’t go their way, kids have a wonderful way of dipping into their creativity and making the most of it. They might be disappointed, but they don’t let that quench their desire and passions. Someone once said something about childlike faith … I think there’s a lot we can learn from those kids.

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