I am going to share a little story of bonding with the Little One.
When we lost our house to foreclosure, we moved to a two bedrooms apartment. The Little One and I were sharing it while going to school.
We had Ikea that year opening stores in the region. Everyone was flocking there since it was new and Swedish! We, like everyone else, went there because we needed some furniture since my aunt on my father’s side had most of our furniture. She kept it hostage and wasn’t going to give it back to us.
At the store we got a new couch but also my mother wanted a desk. A rolling door one that looked great, but we had to assemble it! We got it and brought it home. We left it for a week in the box. The following Saturday, we decided it was time to assemble it.
The Little One had never built any furniture, she decided it was time for her to help me do it. It was normally my task to build and fix things around the apartment. As the mood was light at home, we started to unpack the furniture carefully making sure all the pieces were separated.
Our challenged started when we discovered the instructions were not in our language, but since it was Saturday we had all the time in the world. We continued to proceed and identified the process on how to build that desk.
We were able to assemble the desk in a couple of hours, the issue was that rolling door. It took us several attempts before we got it right. By the time we were done we had spent most of our day working on it.
It was interesting because during the process, we never argued instead we took our time to figure out where everything was going. It was so funny, we proudly moved the desk in the living room near the window.
We looked at the time, the Little One made the best comment ever, “it would have taken me only a couple of hours to do it by myself rather than spending an entire day with her”. I smiled and acknowledge that it was true, but we had fun doing it, so it wasn’t a waste of time.
Sometimes we need to remove expectations doing a project at home with our loved ones, so we can truly enjoy what we are doing. Not feeling we have to get it done in a specific amount of time but instead spending time together laughing and communicating. That is worth more than we can ever imagine.