As toddlers grow, they often surprise their parents with the depth and range of emotions that they experience. The other day, Dylan treated me to a glimpse of an emotion that is not often associated with toddlers – generosity. Not just the sharing kind of generosity, but the kind of generosity that involves giving and expecting nothing in return.
We were out hiking, and suddenly Dylan stopped in the middle of the trail to pick something up. I was halfway through asking him not to pick any more leaves off of the trees when I realized that he was not picking up a leaf. He lifted his hands proudly to show me his find, and I saw it more clearly. Dylan had just found a ten dollar bill in the middle of the forest.
Dylan was so excited, yet I felt compelled to explain to him that the right thing to do when you find something is to see whether you can find the person who lost it before claiming it as your own. I told him that we would check with the park ranger on our way out to see whether anyone was looking for it. He told me that it belonged to “no anyone”, and I chuckled “we’ll see about that”.
When we finished our hike, we got in the car to go home. The park was empty, as it had been all day. When I stopped at the park ranger’s office, there was no one there. There were no notes on the bulletin board about lost money, either. I got back in the car and I told Dylan that I could not find the person who lost the money, so it was his to use as he wished.
He wanted to go to the store and look at some toys, so we stopped in town on the way home. He picked out a couple of little things and then asked me to go to the part of the store where there were baby toys. As I pushed the cart over to the baby aisle I wondered what he was up to. He saw a set of teething keys that were identical to a set that he had at home and asked me to get them. I told him that he already had the same ones at home, and he did not need another set. He looked at me and said “Not for Dylan, Dylan want to buy toy for Baby”. My heart melted. Here was the boy who just recently came to terms with his baby brother playing with any toy, using his own money to buy a toy for his brother.
After we checked out, I told him that he still had a few dollars left. He asked whether we could go next door to the grocery store and I asked him what he wanted in there. He wanted to buy some turkey meat so I could make turkey burgers for dinner, and then he said “Because you buy every food all other times”. He shared his good fortune freely without any prompting, and I will never forget that moment of kindness and generosity.