No is an Essential But Difficult Word to Say

Recently, my 10 years old son, has become obsessed with getting birds, snails, and bearded dragons, to the point that now, he is an expert on everything regarding these animals from all the research he has done.

We used to have a lovely dog, her name was Blossom. She suffered from epilepsy, and past away at 8 years old. We all miss her very much, but even though during the time she was part of our family, she brought us tons of happiness, we also suffered a lot to see her having seizures, and basically our lives were lived around her needs. For example, giving her medicines 4 times a day, having sleepless nights whenever she a had cluster of seizures, or going to different veterinarians, and not being able to travel for vacations.

It has being 3 years since she was gone, but we still miss her, and the one who misses her the most is our dear son. It is hard to see him cry and ask multiple times for a dog. We had told him that we will have a dog again, but now is not the right time because we need time to heal from our loss, and that we will need his help when we bring another puppy to our family. Pets are a big responsibility. The deal is that when he turns 12 years old, we will rescue one.

He will be bigger and responsible enough to help us take the dog for walks, and with the training and cleaning required.

For now we will give him 2 birds for his birthday, we even gave him a gift card from Petco, to give him an incentive to be even more responsible. If he continues to show responsibility with his school work and his chores at home, he will get his pets for his birthday, if he doesn't, he will lose the chance to get them. But I know that he will continue to work hard for what he wants.

When we get rejected or when we want something and hear the word NO, we immediately try harder to get better, we struggle, we shift; that is the only way we learn to fall and keep getting up, so hopefully, we won't give up.

I could say that my husband and I are trying the marshmallow effect experiment on our son, but with pets instead of marshmallows.

Delayed gratification can be a key to success. That is the idea, not to torture our dear son, but to help him to work for what he wants without giving up, so he can have a bigger chance of being successful in everything he does.

Let's try delaying gratification in our lives, even with little things, so we can build up the strength to keep working hard for our biggest dreams, and have the life we want. A life worth living!

Thanks for stopping by!