A kiss doesn’t help
Dropping the boys off at school my 7-year-old caught his arm on his bike. It was a tiny scrape on his arm, not even a scratch, but enough to complain about and so, on instinct, I kissed it. “Kisses don’t work,” he snapped back. Of course, it is just another step towards independence, a good thing in the long term, but I just never thought that these steps on that path would matter to me like they seem to.