Life Lessons from Ben

This morning, I was awakened by my boys with requests for breakfast. I have become quite the slacker since they started school. Your choices around here are either cereal or cereal. So I had promised them that I would fix them whatever they wanted for breakfast, but they needed to agree. I don't do different orders. Anyway, Ben wanted cinammon rolls and Will wanted waffles. I told them we would flip a coin. They were fine with this, and Ben won the toss. Will immediately started screaming (he is 4, after all), and Ben felt bad for him and said he could have waffles. I thought that was very nice, and told Will to thank his brother. Will quietly says thank you, and I suggested a thank you hug. Will started screaming again, "I'm scared! I'm scared!" Now, he wasn't scared. This is what he says when he doesn't want to do something, because he has learned that we usually don't force him to do stuff he is afraid of. I was mad and told him that since he was being ugly to his brother he wouldn't be getting any waffles.

I went to the kitchen and started banging around to get cinammon rolls ready. About a minute later, Ben comes into the kitchen, and he has his mad face on. He says, "I said that we could have waffles this morning. It doesn't matter if Will is being ugly. That isn't going to stop me from being nice to him!" He was mad at me for taking away his kind gesture. And he expressed it in a calm way, no screaming or anything. I was completely humbled. He was showing his brother unconditional love.

So I made waffles. When they were ready, Will was hopping around asking who got the first one. I said, "You know, the whole reason we are having waffles is because your brother was kind to you. Do you think you could show some kindness now and let him have the first one?" He said, "Yeah. I can do that. Ben, you can have the first waffle." Wow, with Will this is huge progress.

Now, come tomorrow morning, I will probably wake up to more screaming and arguing. But for a moment today, Ben taught me something about how I should treat others, even when they are ugly to me. Thanks, Ben. I am proud of you.

Now Will, he has his moments, but he is awesome too. For one thing, he makes me laugh all day long. He asked me earlier, "Can I call you 'Dahling'?" and then, "Can I call you 'Lovey'?"

One of his favorite things in the world is what he calls "super shirts" (or supah shuhts in Will-ese.) This is any shirt he has that has a super hero on it. Actually, it doesn't have to have an actual super hero. He sometimes pretends that there is a super hero on the shirt. For example, he has a shirt that has a shark on it. Now, Ben had gotten a shirt with Optimus Prime (Transformers) on it for his birthday. So Will decided that the shark on his shirt was really Optimus Prime, just transformed into a shark instead of a robot or a semi. He has tons of them. One of them has three fish. He says that those three fish are really Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and Bulkhead (Transformers again). Oh, and the more super shirts you wear, the more super you are. He wore 10 one day. (Click here to see a picture.)

So tonight as he was getting ready for bed, he was bummed that his Transformers underwear was all dirty. So he found his Scooby-Doo in space underwear and put that on. He declared, "I am pretending that it is really Megatron in space." Then he proceeded to put on three more pairs on top of that, just to make sure he was really super.