O: But, that's not the car we were going to buy!

Last Sunday, Kate and I took possession of a brand new, shiny, red car. O and P had been excited all week to see it, and I especially could not wait to see O's face light up when she saw this wondrous new wagon. And when she did see it? Disappointment. It was not the car she expected to see. She remembered the car we looked at a month ago, which is not the car we ended up buying.

It struck me in that moment, how easily we can be disappointed, or how easily we can disappoint, based upon the pictures we create in our minds. With the best of intentions, and with no foresight into the minds of others, be they toddlers or nonagenarians, it can happen. O expected a different car, and I expected a more jubilant reaction.

Neither of us did anything wrong, other than not matching the picture we each had in our own mind. We all experience this daily, whether your morning Starbucks isn't quite as good as what you got yesterday, or whether the eagerly anticipated movie adaptation cannot live up to what you saw in your mind as you read the book. We are human, and as much as we are all the same in the most fundamental ways, none of us sees the world exactly the same as the person next to us.

In this case, O's disappointment vanished the moment she jumped into the car and joined her sister in exploring every inch of our new people mover, or "The Beast," as we have begun to lovingly call it.

So, I learned a lot from O today. While the world does not always live up to the pictures in our minds, if you are willing to keep moving forward and explore, you might be pleasantly surprised by the reality you find.