When you're ready; you're ready.

At the playground there are two slides.  One is for the little kids and you get there by climbing up a flight of playground stairs.  The second is for slightly more daring kids and it's located at the top of a second flight of stairs.  It also is a corkscrew slide.  Typically we relegate our playing to the smaller slide though we have gone down the big slide together once or twice. Claire climbs up the stairs to the small slide, sits down at the top and then does a sort of turning maneuver (the same one she does if she's climbing down off of the bed or the couch) and slides down on her tummy.  She laughs like crazy, eats some of the wood chips at the bottom and runs around to the stairs again.

Yesterday when she got to the small slide, she turned around and smiled at me and kept climbing up.  Almost before I could reach her she had turned around and the top of the tall slide and gone twirling down its cork-screw turns.  I would never have guessed that she was ready and I would never have sent her down on her own.

Claire is emerging as a head-strong determined little person.  I am reading about and thinking about discipline (oh if only we didn't have to discipline our children and they just came out knowing that you shouldn't hit your mom in the face whenever you get the chance). And even as we are working on discipline in my heart I am repeating over and over the words, "Don't ever stop being so brave.  Don't ever stop knowing your heart and what you are capable of."