Keep Up the Great Work

At the dinner table, I found myself looking at Matthew and thinking, Where did the time go? He’s now six years old. It feels like just yesterday when he could barely put two or three words together to form a sentence. Today, he talks like an adult and asks a ton of questions.

“Dad, do you know what ‘objective’ means?” Matthew asked.

“Tell me, what does it mean?” Dad replied, curious.

“Objective means to accomplish something,” he answered, proud of his own definition.

“Well done!” we all said.

After dinner, there was one last piece of homework to finish. Every week, Matthew writes about his week at school, and our homework is to write him a reply.

“Have fun and keep up the great work,” were the last words in Matthew’s journal.

“Oh man, you can’t say that again,” he said after reading it.

Apparently, he takes our journal responses seriously. Telling him to “keep up the great work” every week was starting to stress him out. So, we agreed to switch it up and write that statement every other week.

“That’s great, I like that pattern,” he added.