Mr. Perfect

Gus has been experiencing a really successful academic year so far.  Everything seems to finally be clicking for him, and with that has come hard-earned achievement and even greater self confidence.

Thus far he's had back-to-back perfect-score book reports, he's aced every social studies quiz, and of 20 weekly spelling tests, he's had 100% on 19...missing one word a couple of weeks ago.

Now whereas we're very proud of him, and delighted with his progress, I'm becoming concerned that by achieving all this perfection he  is setting himself up for failure. He was incredibly disappointed when he missed that one spelling word. 

Parents spend so much time trying to teach our kids to do well, I think sometimes we don't teach them how to fail (not that getting 9 out of 10 right on a spelling test is failure.)

I suppose I should just be thankful that Gus takes my advice to "just do your best" seriously. And he knows what he's capable of achieving. But odds are that one day he's not going to do so well. I just need to ensure he knows we'll still be proud of him.