A couple of weeks ago, we got a Ninja Creami and I genuinely underestimated the level of psychological warfare that would immediately begin unfolding around who gets to make the nightly “healthy ice cream.”
Every evening now involves some version of strategic positioning, bargaining and hovering near the machine before dinner is even over, followed by an aggressive race toward the kitchen the second someone remembers there is a frozen Creami container in the freezer ready to be spun into soft serve. Somehow this appliance has completely become the center of gravity in our house.
The other morning I caught one of these moments between Matt and Eden that completely stopped me in my tracks.
Eden started moving toward the machine to lock in the container and start the process. Matt instinctively reached over to stop her because she wasn’t doing it in the order we had learned. Before he could even redirect her, she immediately waved his arm away with a very firm, “No, I’ve got it.”
Instantly, I recognized the motion because it was the exact same thing she used to do since her earliest days as an infant when she was finished with her bottle. Even back then, she would physically push the milk away with this absolute certainty that she was done and already onto the next thing. It was the same little wave away motion and the same conviction that she was already in movement and nothing was going to interrupt it.
What stayed with me afterwards wasn’t whether Eden knew the correct sequence, because she absolutely did not. It was the fact that the interruption itself never fully disrupted her momentum. Even while Matt was redirecting her and explaining the sequence, she was simultaneously taking in the correction while continuing through the process itself.
There’s something interesting about the way children move through the world before they fully understand it. They don’t wait for mastery before participating. They learn while moving. They absorb correction without necessarily treating it as failure, and then they continue forward anyway.
Watching Eden that morning made me realize how differently I often approach things now. I spend a lot more time trying to understand whether something makes sense before fully stepping into it, wanting the sequence, the timing or the outcome to feel clearer beforehand. But there was something really striking about the way she kept moving while simultaneously absorbing the correction in real time, because it reminded me how much intelligence can sometimes exist inside momentum itself.
What struck me most was that she never interpreted the interruption as a reason to stop. The correction simply became part of the process. She adjusted while staying engaged. And honestly, that feels increasingly rare.
For me, underneath all the noise and chaos of the moment was this reminder that not everything meaningful arrives fully formed or fully resolved before it begins moving forward. Sometimes things are still unfolding while we are already inside them.
