I love it when I have proud moments with the kiddos I work with. I've only been with this family for about a month, so I can't give myself as much credit as I did with my last family when I had proud moments, but I still love it when the kids I work with are awesome. D (the 6-year-old boy I nanny) has these remote control helicopters that he likes to bring to the park and play with. There are two of them, and sometimes his sister plays with one, sometimes I do, but more often than not, he lets the other kids who are attracted by these cool helicopters play with him. He doesn't know them and isn't at an age yet where he realizes it's polite to ask for others' names, but he will gladly let them try out his helicopter. Even to the point where he might have two other kids playing with them while he just watches. I was impressed by that. Not many 6-year-olds are so eager to share.
What really impressed me today, to the point of being my Zestful moment (today was really a good one, so there were many), was that the boy he played with today was a child who had a... I'm not sure of the PC term, but it looks like he had a birth defect. One of his hands was different than D's. D never mentioned it while they were playing, and tried to show him how to do the controls with only one hand and such. He was so great! They played happily until D was a bit too cold and it was time to go home. Once we were in the car, of course D had questions. He has questions about eveerrryyythiiiing. We talked about the other boys hand. And actually his 4-year-old sister just kept reminding us that he was just born that way and that's that. She was right. They still had fun, he was a perfectly happy little boy, him and D got along. D's biggest concern was just that he wondered if his hand would grow that way eventually too. He was happy to hear that it wouldn't, and mentioned that he would like to play helicopters with that boy again sometime, and then asked about what video game we would play when we got home. Simple as that.
It just makes me so happy when the kids I work with just accept people for who they are. They might have questions, but it doesn't make them like them any less. And that's how it should be. Yay children with open minds!