“Look, Nana! It’s a ball!”

“Where, Christian?  I don’t see a ball.” I said, cursorily looking up from my iPhone email check.

“it’s right there! See?!”

Try as I might, all I saw was the usual doctor’s office detritus: counter, forms, pens, clipboards, phones, computers, pharmacy company giveaways, and so on.

Then, I spied it.  There actually was a ball there behind the counter at the doctor’s office!

“Christian!  You’re right!  There is a ball there!  How did you see that?!”

I thought to myself, “How did I miss it?!”

“I just sawed it.  I was looking and I just sawed it.”

A few moments later…

“There’s queen, Nana!”

“What queen, Christian?  What sort of queen?  I don’t see anything that looks like a queen,” I said as he pointed to the wall where there was only a doctor’s office generic painting.

“Right there!  It’s queen!”

There was absolutely no royalty on the wall.  Not even close.  I looked past the wall, and on the side was the receptionist counter where, evidently one of the staff had put up their kid’s drawing of the Disney Car’s movie character, Lightning McQueen.

I’ll be darn.  Lightning McQueen, right there hanging on the cork board on the wall behind the counter, big as day.

“Christian!  How did you find that?!” I asked.

“I just sawed it, Nana. I just looked at it and there was ‘Queen’!” (his name for Lightning McQueen)

I thought about how different my and Christian’s perspective was.  The ball and the drawing of his all-time favorite cartoon character  were right there and I never saw them.

I was at the doctor’s office with him because his leg had been hurting over the weekend and his teacher- Mom couldn’t take off by the time she figured it needed to be checked on Monday.  I was sitting there thinking/worrying about all the papers I had to grade and how I had carved out this day to do it, not knowing I’d get a call at my office asking if I could take him to the doctor.

To me, the doctor’s office was simply a place I’d brought him to to have his leg checked.  I’m a grown up and I think about grown up things.  It was, to me, simply a doctor’s office and I saw only doctor’s office things.

But Christian didn’t have those preconceived notions about what it was.  He is a 3-year old and to him the whole world is simply a potential playground because playing is what he does.

He saw it through his eyes, and found the things he cared about. I saw it through mine and saw what I expected to see in a doctor’s office.

No doubt he missed the things I saw and gave credence to, and I certainly did the same for what he saw.  Both of us were in the same place with the same things in our view, but we saw totally different things, shaped entirely by our perspective.

Neither of us was (were?) wrong.  We just saw things based on what we were used to or interested in.

Wow.  Deep.  How much does that happen in our lives, with much greater consequences….?

I closed my iPhone and just sat staring at that precious, awesome little gift in my life.  What lessons Christian and all kids have for us if we just let them give them to us.