If Wishes Were Horses....

I would have a pretty full stable - more than I could feed on my 7 1/2 acres anyway. 

But that's a good thing, right?  Wishes are the start of plans. When you have a plan, you can start the actions that propel you where you want to go. 

I wish so many things for my kids, but I have to trust that I wished for and with them wisely and long enough that they can go out and accomplish those wishes.  My oldest daughter was just signed as a model with an agency in Honolulu - they are interested in her for the Japanese market, which is what I always thought would be her niche.  And my oldest son is getting recognition all over the place for the skills he has quietly been developing since he was 11. 

The tech coordinator at our school emailed me to ask if he would be interested in teaching the middle school kids, or making online tutorials, to teach game development.  I told her to ask him directly, because the 17 year old developmental stage kicked in.  The other day, I mentioned to him that his dad had made a trade of eggs for bananas and that eating a banana when we got home would be a good idea since 1) we had so many and 2) the athletic trainer told me that he should eat within 90 minutes of a hard workout.  He replied, "I don't know why, but when you tell me to do something, it automatically makes me not want to do it - even if I was going to anyway." 

I thought about it for a minute and realized how well I remembered that feeling, and how hard it was for me to explain to my mother when I was 17 and told him, "You are right on developmental schedule.  Congratulations - but you should still eat the banana. If it helps, imagine that it's the trainer telling you and not me." 

I have the two middle schoolers at home, too.  I think they are just starting to make their first grown-up wishes.  I wonder where these wishes will take them?  I wonder, too, if middle-aged me has any wishes left, or if I am just in hard-scrabble existing mode?  Probably it is just somewhere in the middle.  I do have some plans for the land, for my work, but a large chunk of self-doubt that just wasn't there when I was 20 is intruding - and here I thought by my 40's I would be so much more competent....