What did you make today, papa?
I came in from my 10-foot commute once and my 3-year-old looked up from his snack and said, “What did you make today, papa?”
It took me by surprise, as I had always assumed that when I was out of sight I was out of mind. (I now know that children seem to be most interested in you when you’re not around. When you’re actually around, they love to ignore you.) “No, he asks about you all the time,” my wife said. “He always wants to know what you’re doing. I tell him, ‘Papa’s out in his studio making things.’”
How Asking 5 Questions Allowed Me to Eat Dinner With My Kids
By Charles Duhigg
Four years ago, when I began working on a book about the secrets of productivity, I had a hidden motivation: I wanted to figure out how to eat dinner with my kids.
Austin Kleon — Lemony Snicket's Advice on Writing a Nice...
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Do not start with the thank you.
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Start with any other sentence. If you first say, “Thank you for the nice sweater,” you can’t imagine what to write next. Say, “It was so wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day.”
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Then you’re done.
I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes.
