Huff Mantras

On our hike to Lila Lake last week, we were talking to Sikose about the mantras that stuck with Anna and Taylor from growing up. I was so curious to see what they said about the phrases that they remembered being on repeat in our house. Below are the top three: 

This was something that I said again and again, and apparently, it stuck. This came from Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture, when he told a story of buying a new convertible and taking his niece and nephew out for a ride.   His sister (their mom) warned told them not to get their uncle's new car dirty. As Randy listened to his sister’s stern warnings, he realized the kids were being set up for failure as kids just make a mess sometimes. At this point, he opened a can of soda, and while his sister impressed on her kids the need to be careful, Randy slowly and deliberately poured out the can of soda on the back seat of his brand new convertible. His sister asked what he was  doing, and he said “it’s just a thing.” And his nephew wound up being really grateful because he was sick and threw up on the way home in the car. Randy said, “And I don’t care how much joy you get out of owning a shiny new thing; it’s not as good I felt from making sure that an 8 year old didn’t have to feel guilty for having the flu.” 

I loved this story so much with this message that people are more important than things, and this became something we said a lot in our house when stuff broke. 

I think this goes back to a conversation with Rachel White as we were talking about parenting sometime when kids were little when we were living on Halcyon Ave and when she was on Cedar. We wanted our kids to be able to walk into a room and ask the question (without being asked), "What needs to be done?" Future roommates and spouses might thank me down the road for this one... 

And Taylor shared this one from the book Wonder. This book was one of our all-time favorites, and I am so grateful that this is a quote that stuck. May it be so for all of us to have this one tattooed on our hearts. 

a favorite picture from last summer on the Beaten Path in Montana