Do you remember being a kid and the inevitable…spilled milk. At our house, tears always accompanied spilled milk. Can you relate? Why was that?
It wasn’t like our parents yelled or got really mad…still, there was an unspoken rule that if milk spilled, people were not going to be happy about it…aka mom and dad.
When we got married and had children, one of the first rules we decided on was that our kids were not going to cry over spilled milk. We weren’t sure how we would do it…we just knew it had to be done.
Shortly after our first little girl was born and was old enough to use a cup of milk all by herself, we set her in her high chair and explained the rules of drinking out of a cup with milk…hahah the joke was totally on us. That very meal, the milk, and the cup came down, all over the floor.
Both of us froze…we looked at each other, we slowly looked at Alexa. She looked back at us. We all looked over the edge of the table at the milk mess. Then we waited for the tears to start. This was uncharted milk territory and we wanted to keep our cool.
We waited for an entire 10 seconds…1..2…3…4..5…6…7…8…9..10. Ten seconds is a long time folks, especially for spilled milk. There was spilled milk on the floor, it was running down the side of the high chair filling in the cracks of the wood floor.
As kids, it was a panic frenzy to get that milk cleaned up as quickly as humanly possible with words like,”toss me that towel…hurry I need another one, quick!”
We took a deep breath and smiled. “It’s ok Alexa,” we both said, and started to clean up the milk.
To our surprise, there were no tears.
Since that first milk spill, we are happy to report, NOT ONCE have there been tears over spilled milk, from both of our girls. And there has been a lot of spilled milk. Why is that…we aren’t these superhero amazing parents…come on!
We think that it has something to do with the accidental waiting part. Kids are good at reading moods and reactions. We have trained ourselves to freeze when there is spilled milk in order to reset our mood and so we don’t give off a bad reaction. Then we can clean up the milk in a more neutral mood…(even though on the inside, we aren’t totally thrilled about cleaning up milk.)
That first time Alexa spilled milk, her first reaction was to look at us..this was totally new to her and she was looking at us to see what the proper social response was to spilled milk. Since we were doing our kid-milk-experiment, our reaction was caution and curiosity…wondering if she was going to cry.
Are you still with us? What does this have to do with anything?
With this whole new business thing and living at the office…we are looking at life and trying to make it better, more meaningful…it makes you wonder what change can occur when a different perspective is used.
In the past few months of getting our new business going, there have been multiple obstacles where we almost threw our hands up and said done! We can’t even count how many… it’s been rough. We have had the most success when we come at a problem from a different angle. Seeing it differently gives us new ideas and helps us get past obstacles that seem literally impossible. The challenges are far from over…we just hope we can find the perspective to conquer them! You got this too!