[Parenting] The lesson learned from the kids' work

Do you remember our visit to Little Ray's reptile zoo?

If not, see here.

Warning: you will see more grotesque pictures in that posting I just linked.

When you exit the zoo part, there is a gift shop, of course.

 Each of my kids made an ardent appeal to buy them a stuffed snake. Both of my boys are crazy about stuffed toys since their infancy. Each of them has at least 30 stuffed animals, or 40. I should count them some day. And the troop of stuffies is growing non-stop. :(

We have all kinds of animals at home: tiger, dog, giraffe, frog, turtle, penguin, cat, rats, monkey, dinosaur, (of course) all sizes of bears and even a shark. Now two snakes joined the gang.

 The following day we went to visit the Little Ray's,

I found this outside of their bathroom.

What do you think?

  

 This was exactly what we saw at Little Ray's.

A phyton suffocates its prey by wrapping the prey tighter and tighter until it stops breathing.

At the reptile museum, we saw an already dead mice swallowed by th python. Still it was more than grotesque, as you imagine. Remi refused to see it directly when the python started to wrap the mice.

But I guess he saw it from the corner of his eyes.

And he made his newly-acquired stuffed snake to perform this.

Guess what I learned.

Lesson learned:

You'd better be a good model and example for your kids, because they don't just learn things quick, but they absorb what they see and learn.

And this was a good example.

But, you know.

Kids are kids.

They don't only rerun the scene they see,

but they know how to melt their mommy's heart. :)

Is it normal that I felt much better after I saw this super big heart?

Sometimes phythons can be sweet, rarely though :)

From here, if you are a smoker, you might not like what I write below:

Both Mr. D and I dislike smoking. Neither of us ever tried the cigarette once in our lives.

We've told our kids that the smoking is one of the worst things they can do to their parents and their own bodies.

And when Remi went to a Chess camp when he was 6, he saw one of his instructors smoking,

Guess what he did. He went directly to the smoking insturctor who was obviously older than me, and told him exactly what I had told him: "Brad, stop smoking. It's one of the worst things you can do to your parents and your own body"

OMG. I didn't want him to embarrass a grown-up like that!!!

But, the instructor was a very patient and nice soul. He told Remi very frankly that it was so hard even though he had tried several times.

I heard this story from the both sides.

In that sense,

I must stop drinking diet cokes in front of kids, even though it would not be easy.

Because, I don't want my kids to drink sodas, at least for another decade. (They are 8 and 5 +1/2)

This was a little Friday night story :)

I'll try to decrease my consumption of coke from two cans to one.

(We went to the zoo in the weekend of my older son's 8th birthday.

So these birthday photos were in the same folder)

T.G.I.F.

A Good Model