Little words, Big meaning

Happy (almost) New Year, friends!

We are busy planning for an awesome night out on the to… oh wait, nope. We have kids. I forgot. We will be in our jammies by 8:00 and might make it to sip sparkling cider when the ball drops. Might.

I wanted to share a fun little something I’ve been working on for my girl’s rooms. I’ll have a blog tutorial coming up in the next few weeks but I figured I should probably actually finish the project before I post about it. So here we are in the idea phase.

Reese is two and rapidly learning all kind of new words, phrases, and meanings. It’s pretty scary having a little person follow you around and mimic you all. day. long. What if I say something I don’t want her to say?

Scratch that.

I’m for SURE going to say stuff I don’t want her to say. So for the sake of teaching the both of us to be careful with our words, we are skipping past the generic “be nice” and going straight for more of the meat and potatoes of words.

But really what’s the point of knowing words if she doesn’t know the meaning? So we’re going to do both.

It should be pretty easy for her to remember these words since they’ll be hanging in her room (pictures and tutorial pronto. promise).

So here’s the list including a little description of how I’ll be trying to communicate the meaning:

be kind – kind means i love you
be authentic – authentic means to just be YOU
be generous – generous means to take what you have and give it away
be respectful – respectful means to be kind to yourself AND to others
be confident – confident means to love who GOD made you to be
be sensitive – sensitive means to see a friend and care about them

The list will grow but we’re going to start here. The whole goal this year is to be intentional in conversation with Reese and Rowe. To invest in their little selves so they can begin to understand the value of putting others first. We will look for opportunities to use these words and talk about their meaning as much as possible.

So here’s to a new year and a new opportunity to be careful little mouths what you say.

Here’s to learning and re-learning the weight of our words and choosing to be kind, authentic, generous, respectful, confident, and sensitive.