To Choose Joy: Don't touch that!

Ava's preschool class got to take a field trip to see the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra this week. I brought all three of my sweet little monkeys along. While the performance was designed for preschoolers, and was done beautifully, it was still 45 minutes of sitting in the same chair, looking in the same direction, with the expectation of relatively quiet attention.

That's a lot of minutes for people who have only been alive for a few minutes more than that (minutes that, I'll add, are flying by far too quickly). At home this month, we're focusing on patience, and what it means to wait with a happy heart. To help the lesson stick on orchestra day, I did a little of my own orchestrating ahead of time.

I want to enrich my kids. I want to stretch their beautiful little minds with a world of experiences. I want them to learn to be quiet and sit still when the need to. I also want to set them up for success and teach them how to sit quietly in places where etiquette requires quiet sitting, without just expecting that they've come wired to be able to do it.

All too often, I lose sight of the newness of my children and expect them to just know how to do things that I take for granted. Kids are wired to see and touch and move and feel and verbalize and hear. After a few too many painful experiences with my own sweat and frustration and tears as I attempted to force long periods of waiting-in-quiet-stillness onto tiny people who learn through movement and hands-on-and-in-and-around interaction with their environment, I've learned to come prepared.

When our firstborn was 21 months old, we braved ULTA together in search of a new hairbrush. I wheeled her stroller through the bold and bright aisles, filled with shiny, sparkly, lovely little things. I expected that since she had mastered the phrase "don't touch that" at home, she should just understand that it meant the same thing here. A less-than-two-year-old. I know. I'm in the future, too.

Needless to say, in my naivety, I was shocked when she reached out and wrapped her tiny fingers around as many bottles of nail polish as she could. And didn't want to let go.

But, why should she want to let go? She hadn't yet learned that my instruction about not touching little breakable things that didn't belong to her applied in places outside of our home. She needed more repetition. And she needed my patient willingness to walk her through it.

So, the next day, I set up a pretend store in our living room, and put as many beautiful and breakable things as I could find on the "shelves." I mixed in toys and treats as do-touch-that rewards, and we practiced the "don't touch that" rule in a safe place. And, we repeated it the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that.

I love this verse because it speaks to this concept, even though its context is about teaching God's word: "..be prepared in season and out; correct, rebuke, and encourage, with great patience and careful instruction," (2 Timothy 4:2).

We've done the same kind of thing as we did with our imitation store to practice what it takes to be patient through other out-of-our-home-routine situations, like sitting in a restaurant and waiting for food (because, let's be honest--at home, who makes their kid sit at the dinner table for half an hour or more before the meal is ready to be served?). I've learned to always bring a bag of fun things along with us, so that our kids can experience how to be still and wait with a happy heart. I want them to see that patience is more than just sitting in one place and not touching things. Patience requires hope and trust. Hope for what we don't yet have. Trust that whatever is on the other side of the waiting is worth it.