A couple of days ago my usually-sunny Jesse looked a little perturbed when he got into the car after school. A substitute teacher had assigned the class to write a story using their vocabulary words, due the next day. I don’t know if his consternation was due more to the “that’s not the way our teacher always does it” syndrome or to the fact that he had so short of a notice, or what. We got home and he chilled out in his usual after-school fashion by getting a snack and watching cartoons for a little while, then playing video games.

He usually does homework after dinner, but for some reason we both got distracted and forgot about it until 9:00 — an hour before his bedtime. He rummaged around his backpack for his vocabulary book before shamefacedly telling me he had left it at school.

I was not pleased, to say the least, and my expression surely showed it, because he apologized immediately.

Now — we only live about 3-7 minutes away from the school, depending on traffic and red lights. And I have a key to the building he would need to get into to get his book. The last thing I wanted to do at 9:00 p.m. was go out in the dark with a thirteen year old to unlock a building a retrieve a book. Something I wrestle with often as a parent is when to let a child take the consequences of his actions and when to jump in and help. I didn’t say anything for a few minutes as I mulled this over.

Then Jesse came up with the idea of calling a girl in his class whom he knew to be “responsible” and asking her for the words and definitions. So she graciously read every vocabulary word and its definition over the phone while he wrote them out longhand.

He then came back to his backpack to get out the paper to start writing his story and found — his vocabulary book!

We all had a good laugh about it and teased him that at least that was a good way to study his vocabulary. Hopefully this will also spur him to check to make sure he has all the books he needs before he comes home. I was especially glad I hadn’t taken him to school at night to get the book that was safely home! And I learned yet again to give them a few minutes to work out a solution before providing one.