Dinner and a show-off

We had a friend over for dinner last night, which is not very common in our home. It's not that I don't enjoy having friends over, I would love to do it more often, but we have a pretty small place that we all have to eat chinese-style at the coffee table! Luckily, our friend was fine with that so my boyfriend, my son and I all came home early to cook and clean.


Now mind you, my son is only 8 so I wasn't expecting much assistance from him when he had much more important things to do- like ride his scooter or make a mess in his room. Well, much to my surprise, I turn around when I hear the vacuum go on! And after that, he comes into the kitchen asking for the duster so he can dust the living room. Ok, so this kid wants bragging rights...that's fine by me!

So we're sitting at dinner and talking about many random things when my son starts interjecting with "I'm a really fast runner" and "I'm such a good goalie at soccer- I didn't let any balls in last game." When that doesn't get the reaction he's looking for, he decides to bring out the big guns. Suddenly my coffee table is overrun with robots. We have blinking eyes, remote control arms, laser sounds, robotic voices- I'm talking a full-blown duel. All this just to show-off for a new friend. Classic 8 year old material.

But then I started thinking, that with all of the job hunting I have been doing, I could probably learn a valuable lesson from him. When, in the course of traveling from child to adult do we lose that unbending sense of self-confidence? Now of course we all need to teach our children to be humble, and there is a fine line between teaching humility and hurting their self-esteem, but where along the way to we start knocking OURSELVES down a few pegs? So here I've been, searching through all of these job ads and taking myself out of the game (for various reasons) without even giving it a shot!

So I have decided that before I go to bed tonight, I am going to stand in front of the mirror and say "I'm a really fast runner!"