Having kids is so enlightening, heart warming, and heart breaking, often all at once.

This morning I took my 3-year-old to gymnastics class. He loves his teacher, and when we arrived he excitedly told me he was going to tell his teacher that his seat in the car faces forward now—something that's changed since the last time he saw her and that feels big and significant to him.

We got in, and it turns out his teacher is out so he has a substitute. He was really shy with the new teacher, so I told him he can still tell her about his front facing seat if he wants. A couple minutes later he took her hand and walked away, and I overheard him say “I face forward in the car”.

I'm pretty sure the teacher didn't understand what he said, and if she did, she certainly didn't understand the significance. To her, it was just one of those random weird things kids say.

But to me it was a reminder that the stuff he says comes from somewhere. He was trying to share something significant with someone important in his life (or her replacement in her absence). It's amazing he had that need to share, heart breaking who he shared it with couldn't appreciate the significance, and a reminder to me that when he says or does weird stuff, it's because there's a lot of associations and emotional stuff being processed under the surface I don't have visibility into