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Has your child ever had their world come crashing down around them?
Have you?
It would be a very rare person, indeed, who never had anything bad happen to them.
Sometimes unfortunately we have to simply accept that bad things happen to good people. I know it’s not fair but its better we prepare our kids that it will happen so that when it does they can know how to react in a positive way and move forward through the hardship on toward happiness again.
It’s a critical skill that every child needs to learn in order to not just survive but thrive in their lives!
In other words, we need to teach our kids how to make lemonade out of Life’s lemons!
How do we do that?
Let me share a very personal story with you that may help give you some ideas of how to empower your own kids…
One of Life’s Lemons…
A few years ago, our sweet doggie passed away, the day after her 10th birthday. As you can imagine my kiddos were quite emotionally overwhelmed. They had never experience death of a loved one before and this was one of life’s hardest lessons to learn but a very good one.
Instead of allowing them to stay in the depths of despair, I helped them see the bigger picture. We sat down together and cried and embraced.
We let our tears start our healing, and then I asked them what they loved most about Candy, our doggie, and we sat for a long, long time talking about all the things we loved about her and then moved on to all the silly and crazy things that she always did.
Our tears turned from tears of sadness of tears of laughter as we vividly relived all of her crazy antics that made us love her all the more.
Because it had just been her birthday, my kiddos asked if we could make her a cake. So we decided to bake 4 cupcakes in honour of Candy. One for each of our family. We decorated them while continuing to talk about all our memories and then we put candles in them all and sang ‘we love you Candy’ to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’
We each made a wish for Candy’s soul and eternal life of happiness and peace as we blew out our individual candles. It was a very intimate moment and one we will treasure in our hearts forever.
So that was the ‘life’s lemons’ part of the story, the sad part that we tried to make as gentle as possible with our memories and the cupcakes.
Now for the “Lemonade”…
My daughter was very personally touched by the way we had grieved for Candy and wanted to help other kids cope with the loss of their own pets.
So she asked if we could write a book to honour Candy and show other kids how you can deal with the loss of a beloved pet in a way that feels good and heals the soul.
She decided to write the book, “Remembering Candy“. In it she told the story of how Candy had come into our live and how she had passed. She shared all the beloved and funny stories that we had recalled on that special day and then asked everyone in our family to help her with the illustrations for her book.
It became such a special bonding time as we each drew and coloured our pictures with love. She wanted to make sure that her book would really help other kids so we added a special sec
tion at the back of her story of how others can also cope with the loss of their own beloved pets.
My daughter had taken life’s lemon, the loss of our sweet Candy, and turned it into lemonade, helping other kids.
It was an amazing life lesson and a great example of how we can help prepare our children for the inevitable hard times that they will each face by looking further at how their individual experiences may somehow have a positive affect either on their own life or on the life of a fellow soul.
My daughter, Xanthe, and her little brother, Quinn, created this cute cartoon to share their experience with you.
I hope you will enjoy it and would be honoured if you would share it so it may help more families. Thank-you.
Honestly, you will love the cartoon, it is sure to pull at your heart strings!
Click here to take a quick look inside their book.
I hope our story has been able to inspire you with this example. It’s about helping our children cope with life’s ups and downs in a positive way rather than allowing them to get ‘stuck’ in the bad times. It’s about teaching them that it’s okay to feel the pain, and then to turn it into something better.
Here’s to you and your child’s success with turning all of your and their life’s lemons into lemonade too!
Cheers…Amanda van der Gulik…Excited Life Enthusiast! ;o)
P. S. What lemons has your child experienced in their life that they have turned into lemonade, or could if they could just learn how to change their perspective?
P. P. S. Did you find this article helpful? If so, then please help me empower more kids, teens and their families by leaving me your own comments below and clicking the ‘like’ button and ‘sharing’ it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Thank-you for helping me empower more Healthy Wealth Mentality kiddos. We need them! 😀
“Together we can raise kids and teens who are money savvy and get to follow their dreams because they know how to handle and value their money…and not come back crawling home to mom and dad to get them out of financial trouble!”
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