FInally, he got something wrong.

I've mentioned before that Noah is a bit of a perfectionist.

When he colors outside the lines, or makes the tail on his lowercase "a" a bit too long, he gets upset. He has to start all the way over. It is so distressing to him that he just can't move on until the error has been rectified.

So I was quite pleased when the other day, he showed some signs of being able to accept some imperfections.

We were on the way home after a long day of school and work. Usually, I pick the kids up from my mom's house and, after loading everyone up and ensuring they've all buckled and that everyone has their jackets and lunchbags and mooses and shoes, I'll sit in mom's driveway and look through the boys' backpacks for a moment. Noah's will have some bit of work that he's done at school, cutting and pasting and tracing a few letters. Travis's will have his homework for that evening and a handful of graded homework, assignments completed during school, and tests and quizzes.

I review Travis's graded work to see if there is something we need to go over. I pick out the pages with errors on them (there are usually very few, this kid's work is chock full of VG+'s, which is the A+ of today's second-grader, I don't know if that's supposed to be more politically correct or what the point is, but whatever the reason, Travis is primarily a VG+ student), just so that Travis can take a look at them and see where his mistakes are. Most of the time it's something silly (he's notorious for forgetting punctuation at the end of a sentence).

Anyway, as we drive home, I hand the papers back to him so he can take a look at what he missed. (Don't worry, parenting zealots, I also spend a fair amount of time praising him for his good work. The entire exchange is quite positive and the point is not to just be talking about his mistakes but more to make sure he's got an awareness of what he can improve on.)

Anyway, at this point in the trip, Noah and Sophie insist on also taking a look at Travis's schoolwork. Sophie wants to look at whatever page has pictures on it. Noah wants to look at the math homework.

I don't know why, that's just the way it is.

So, we invariably spend time passing around Travis's work so that Noah can examine the math work (Six plus four is ten! I knew that already! Six plus five is eleven! That one's easy because you just add one more!) and Sophie can giggle at the pictures (This frog is cute mom. He has a hat. I wish I had a frog with a hat. I wish I was a frog. Mom, I'm a frog. I'm wearing a hat.)

So last week, this routine was humming along as per usual, Noah was reviewing the math homework, when he exclaimed, "MOM! I'm good at writing the number two."

That's great, Noah.

He continued, "But I'm GREAT at writing a backwards two!"

I'm empowered by this. My five-year-old no longer considers his tendency to write certain letters or numbers backwards as a failing on his part. Now he's decided he's just particularly talented at writing them that way.

That, my friends, is a talent.

P.S. NO, I'm not worried that I'm encouraging him to not care about doing things correctly. He's so insanely concerned with getting things right so much of the time that I consider it a step in the right direction that he now has the ability to accept what it means to be a five-year-old going through the learning process. I was worried about him getting discouraged too easily by not always getting things right. Being awesome at writing backwards....WIN!