Bird Appreciation
“It’d be so nice to be a bird,” my 8 year old son remarked from the backseat of the car on our way to school this morning.
“So you can fly around all day long?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the traffic light that was about to turn green.
“That and I’d have such a pretty view from the roof where they stand.”
“Not if birds don’t know what views are,” my 12 year old daughter pointed out to her brother.
“What? Birds don’t appreciate the view they got?”
“Kinda like how you guys don’t appreciate a full frig of food if hadn’t gone through famine like your grandparents.”
“Yeah, that’s why we prefer beef jerky from the store rather than boiling our leather belt!”
My kids do have a point. Who’d rather eat a leather belt when beef jerky comes in flavors like original, smoked, hot and spicy how could birds appreciate their awesome view when they stand up high on the roofs all day long? They’ve got no other view to compare with even if they are capable of doing such comparison. So what makes us parents think our kids are capable of appreciating the sacrifices we make for them? Just like those birds with the awesome view, our kids do not have the marks of growing pains we have, so how could they appreciate? We can either wait til they have their own marks of growing pains or we could teach them to appreciate by appreciating who they are to us.