Last night as I cooked dinner, I tried to think of something that had happened this week to write about. My little helper, Kiera, was standing beside me as I flipped a pancake. No judging. We were going for an easy dinner. Now, back to the stove.
As I was cooking, I said out loud, “Mommy, has to write a story and I don’t know what to write it on.” Kiera pipes up and says, “A piece of paper!!” Thanks, sweet girl. You just solved my dilemma.
Kiera gets her randomness from me. Aaron quite often refers to me as “Queen Random.” I am almost certain that my little girl might take that title one day.
I remember one of the first random conversations that we had. It was at least a year ago. I was driving her to daycare one morning. Kiera was quietly riding in the back seat of our SUV. Our poor child is also not a morning person, but that is a story for another time.
I had just driven through an intersection when Kiera piped up from the back seat. “I don’t want to go to Heaven.”Now, I have an over active imagination. I try to stay away from horror movies for that very reason. As her sentence sunk in, I quickly glanced out the windows, checking to see if there was a car hurtling towards us. I briefly wondered if there was an angel in the back seat, whispering to her. I glanced out my window and looked towards the sky. I’m not sure what I expected to see, honestly.
Once I decided that she didn’t mean to come off sounding creepy, I responded as any intelligent mom would. I said, “What?”
She said, “I don’t want to go to Heaven.” I looked in the rearview mirror at her and said, “But, baby, we all want to go to Heaven.”
I begin to go into more detail while still trying to keep the conversation light and simple. Sounds impossible, right?
“Honey, we all want to go to Heaven. When we are good and love God, He takes us to Heaven.” In my head, I begin to panic over all the questions that could possibly arise out of this answer. I stumbled a little more as I tried to give her more information before stopping and asking, “Why don’t you want to go to Heaven?”
Kiera met my eyes in the rearview mirror and said, “Because this is our city!”
Oh. Well. It was at that moment I learned to follow her question with one of my own.
One of the questions that so recently stumped me was about foster care. Some of our family members are foster parents. Kiera quite frequently gets to play with the kids. One night, she asked, “Where does Gigi get her babies?” I can only assume that she thought maybe there was a section in Wal-Mart that she had not discovered yet.
I paused, trying to gather my thoughts on how to best describe foster care. I begin stumbling over my words. It went something like, “Well…sometimes…ummm… sometimes… Mommies and Daddies need help… ummm… learning to take care of their kids? Uhhh…well. Does that make sense?”
She looked at me and responded with, “No.” I took a deep breath and prayed for divine intervention. I knew without a doubt that the next day, the daycare kids would be in for a new lesson. I also knew that if I didn’t phrase my answers correctly, her teacher, JoLynn, would be calling to tell me what Kiera had told the kids. Honesty, I was a little terrified. As I paused, she reached over and patted me and said, “It’s ok, Mommy. You can tell me.”
That snapped me out of my thoughts. There’s nothing like the tables suddenly being flipped. I felt like the child and Kiera was the mom! I managed to gather my thoughts and explain to her in the best way I could about foster care.
I’ve learned as a Mom to always expect the unexpected. The funny thing is, even though I expect the unexpected, most of the time, she still catches me off guard.
