The Hidden Beauty of a Band-Aid

Fashion Band-Aids That
Our 7-Year Old Carries

Since last Friday, our daughters have been visiting with their grandparents in New York. Ironically, this past Monday my wife had to drive from our home in Maryland to her parents to attend a funeral of her great aunt.

My wife planned to stay at her folks with our girls Monday overnight, attend the internment service on Tuesday and drive back the same day - leaving the girls to finish the rest of their stay at Nana's and Papa's.

For the 18 hours that she was in New York, my wife packed five different pairs of footwear - including a pair of new heels for the funeral service. When you subtract her eight hours of sleep, where she's not actually wearing shoes, my wife packed five pairs of footery for approximately 10 hours time. There's ample foot fodder there for a stand alone blog but I'll tiptoe around it since I want to remain happily married.

I bring up all this ancillary information because my wife was wearing the new-ish heels at the service without nylons, so she developed a few scorchers of blisters. She shared her podiatry problems with our 7-year old who instantly reached inside her mini-Hello Kitty hand bag and produced two fashion-tinted, purple band-aids [see photo insert] and said, "Here mommy, these will help."

Kim gratefully took them and applied each to the throbbing fluid-filled bubbles on her heels to help them heal. Now the "hiddden beauty" I alluded to in the title has nothing to do with the actual fashionista color palette of the bandages, but it has everything to do with our daughter's gesture.

Ever since our daughters were old enough to walk, and subsequently fall, my wife has always been at the ready with loads of love, hugs and bandages - even when the skin was not broken.

The beauty of this gesture by our 7-year old lies in her immediate mirroring of this positive behavior. My wife and I strive to continually plant seeds of kindness, helpfulness and preparedness in the hearts of our girls. It seems that those seeds are bearing positive fruit, and in this simple story my wife directly benefited from its beauty.

Question: Is there an instance or story where you've seen a child do something beautiful?