We live in an area where winter includes snow. This means that sometimes we are stuck indoors, as driving in freezing rain or snowy weather is not comfortable for me. I do not even like being a passenger. Unfortunately, the ramifications are that we may have something scheduled that we cannot attend, requiring us to cancel or change the date. My original plan was to try to put off the decision until I saw what the weather would actually be as we got closer to the time we needed to leave the house.
It was quite a long morning of back-and-forth conversation, with me using terms like, "maybe" and "let's wait." RJC came to sit next to me on the couch where she could focus soley on me and not be distracted by her iPad. This was a very intense exchange. Eventually I could see she had gone from trying to understand, to feeling agitated as she was moving closer to me, and at that point I realized that it was kinder to simply cancel and reschedule. For her, even when I had her look out the window and I called her attention to the snow piling up, the terms "maybe" and "let's wait" were too abstract.
I give her huge credit for not getting loud and that she did not hit her arms or face. She was really trying to understand and trying to get me to understand her.
I told her she could pick a new date, and she chose one in the summer. That took me aback for a moment as I thought she would want to go as soon as possible. Then it dawned on me that in the summer there is no chance of snow, and my gal was not going to take the chance of being disappointed again due to winter weather.
RJC is both logical and smart, and it is always an amazing pleasure to watch her figure things out on her own and handle change and disappointment in a more appropriate way than in the past.
