My four year old daughter, Lili loves to help cook. Last night, we made taco bowls. She isn’t particularly helpful sometimes, but I know that she some day will be, and I don’t want to discourage her in the meantime, so she is limited to stirring the pot and adding ingredeints that I have already measured. Things went very well until we got to the part where we put the food on the table.

I put food in the bowl, she took it to the table. She got her own bowl and her brother’s bowl onto the table, but when it came time for Daddy’s bowl, she tripped over herself about half way there and almost dropped the bowl. Miraculously, she managed to catch it and the only thing that ended up on the floor was a big dallop of sour cream along with some shreds of cheese. She was clearly distraught and I laid asside what I was doing to come to her aid.

“This is okay. We didn’t spill much, we can go get more, no problem.” I said to her.

We went back to the counter where I had the tub of sour cream with a spoon still in it. She held onto the bowl while I added another big dallop.

“Are you okay?” I asked her as we walked holding the bowl together, my hands over hers. “Did you get hurt? Are you sad?”

We put the bowl on the table and she told me she bumped her knee. I took a look at it.

“Good news,” I told her. “You’re not bleeding. Looks like we won’t have to amputate.”

She giggled.

“Let’s get a paper towel and clean up our sour cream mess,” I suggested. But there wasn’t much left to clean up, as our dog had already made short work of it.

After that, we got the rest of the food put on the table.

“We did a good job, didn’t we?” I asked her.

She agreed, and we celebrated with a high five and a hug. I was happy that I had managed to help her turn it around so that, despite her accident, she could still feel like she had been a success.

And it made me realize something. This is for all you parents out there who feel like they’re screwing it up really bad.

You can make mistakes and overall still have done a really good job. I feel like we pay too much attention to the negative things in life. The things that didn’t go the way we planned, the mistakes we made, the things we wish we had known at the time. We can’t control everything, but we can control what we pay attention to.

I really like what the character Baily says in Anne Brasher’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, “Being happy isn’t having everything in your life be perfect. Maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things; making those count for more than the bad stuff.”

Isn’t it amazing that kids have so much to teach us about the world despite not having very much experience with it?