While doing homework with my son the other day we had to pick a book, read it, and complete a very simple book report.  After deciding on which book to read we started our way through its pages, I began to realize that the book that we had chosen was a bit longer than I thought.  It was somewhat longer than it really needed to be for the type of report he was doing.  We continued to make our way through, as I noticed it was not just my son’s attention span that was failing.  I had reached the point of, battling, staying with the story and not allowing my mind to go elsewhere.  He was beginning to wiggle, squirm, get the fidgets and so on.  You know the things that first grade boys do naturally. 

At this point he stopped. Then started to look ahead and count the number of pages he, well we, had left to read.  I told him he had done a great job and I would take over for the last few pages. I began to read as we made our way to the last two pages he said, “wait”!  He took the book back and placed it in front of him, he read the last two pages.  He closed the book turned to me with a very big smile and said, “see dad, if you just keep going you’ll eventually get to the end”.  I smiled back and said, “yep son your right, we just got to keep on going”. 

I thought to myself later that night, if we could just have that mind set about so many different things we all would be a lot better off!