Gifts and Whales

One thing that I’ve had to learn is that when you give a gift, you no longer have control over it.
Here that is magnified b/c I live with the people that I give gifts too, and I see others give my children gifts. I might see them re-gift an item, or they forget that “super special thing that you thought they’d love” in the laundry room, and you realize that it’s not as important to them as it was to you. A very specific example of this…
Steve decided to take the kids camping to the river for the night. Earlier that day, I had just given the new girl a blanket that I had been keeping in my room. It was freshly laundered and smelled like fabric softener! She had been too cold the night before, and so it seemed like a nice thing to do for her.
The next evening, I went up in her room to stop the toilet from running, C— can’t hear if the water doesn’t stop filling, and she’d been the last one in the bathroom. I noticed that my blanket wasn’t on the new girls bed, I looked in their dirty laundry- she had taken it camping, and it no longer smelled like fabric softener, BUT campfire.
All I could think was, why the nice blanket??? Why didn’t you take already dirty blankets? Or a sleeping bag from the laundry room?
But as a gift, I had to let it go.
Another example of this is kids sharing! I want to be proud of them for it, but recently C—received some sweet (smelly!!) pencils and (novelty!!) erasers, and a couple days later I realized that she’d given most of them away. I wasn’t the giver, but I thought to myself- would other adults see that as being ungrateful, or be hurt? I realized they’d probably be proud of her, but hard to wrap my mind around. The kids really share a lot, and I don’t know if that’s big family culture, Mexican culture, or just they way we’ve taught them to live.


I was having a long talk with a child yesterday, and she told me they don't make close friends with people b/c when you spend a lot of time with people they lose respect for you. I told her to go away then, that all of our chatting was causing me to lose respect for her. She then laughed and realized how ridiculous what she said was. But I think she genuinely believes it. What warped, sad thinking.

Not many people have watched the whale watching videos yet, so I’m going to embed them. There are 4 of them and they are all under a minute. One is only 7 seconds long. One has a rainbow where the whale snorts at us. There is lots of squealing and giggling, and at one point a whale obeyed me :) I tell him to snort and he does, but maybe it was coincidence and not obedience b/c I was saying it every 15 seconds ;)











Have a nice Saturday!