"A journey of a thousand miles..."

"...begins with a single step." - Anonymous

Every day, I find myself relinquishing more and more of my control-freak mentality and placing it into the hands of my daughter... and I am - surprisingly! - reveling in it.

I feel free.  I feel like just when I thought I had myself figured out (TYPE A, to the tee), I've accepted that perhaps I never will, as life is always propelling us forward and shedding new light upon old ways of thinking.

Although I am the parent, I don't feel as if I should be the dictator.  I embrace the words, "Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child."

Today's lesson:  We went to Target... and O wanted to walk.  So I let her - gasp! - instead of forcing her to sit in the cart for the duration of the shopping experience.  She was able to walk next to me - gasp! - holding my hand through the parking lot, and right into the wonderful world of Target on her terms. 

I was okay with her being next to me in her clothes section, and with her wandering through the colorful aisles of toys at shelf level.  We even paused multiple times to examine the things that caught her eye.

My baby girl is only going to be a little girl once.  Why should we rush through our days?  My life is not so busy that we can't take a moment to look at Career Barbie together.  My sometimes unrealistic time constraints need to take a back seat... to allow time for us to push a truck down an empty aisle back and forth or to remove some white capri pants off their rack (don't fret, we put them back neatly and in size order, of course... some things will never change, LOL).

Eventually, she wanted to get into the cart so she could eat some snack and drink some juice.  And at that point, she was ready for the shopping to resume.

Little did she know... 

I wasn't.