There are moments in life when your children bring tears to your eyes. Some of these moments are unexpected and that is what happened to me yesterday.
My oldest son is 11 and in Middle School. I have blogged about him before with regard to his journey since starting on Empower Plus in February of this year. One of the areas that he had struggled with was fine motor skills and eye/hand coordination.
Well-that seems to be a problem of the past. Yesterday we took all three boys to the batting cages as we just signed up the 2 younger ones for spring baseball and thought it would be nice to get some practice in.
Our oldest son has not played baseball in the past except for playing at school or a family/neighborhhood game at the playground. Our middle son went first-he is the one that wants to be a professional athlete and is quite a baseball player – he struggled at first and could not hit a pitch. We reminded him it had been awhile and practice makes perfect. Our youngest one went next and he has been practicing in the neighborhood and he, too, could not hit the ball. This went on for several attempts each and the two of them getting frustrated. I looked over at my eldest son sitting quietly in a chair. I asked him if he wanted to try and he said “Yes, I would.” Well…..he started hitting every ball pitched to him. The whole family froze and looked at each other in disbelief and then back at him…with pride. He made it look so easy…like he had been doing this his whole life. He told his brothers you just have to study the machine and get your count down. He then moved on to a faster pitch and hit those, too! The smile on his face was priceless – that is what brought ears to my eyes.
It is important to remember that it takes some of us longer than others to learn a skill or for that matter to like a sport or an activity or even a food. The lesson here is to remember to re-introduce things to your children-they do have the ability to surprise us in so many ways.
When you live in a sports town like we do, it is so easy to judge a child’s ability too quickly which is so unfair. I learned another lesson from my child and I hope you did too!
