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A Four-Year Old’s Intro to Framing

What a birthday faux pas can teach you about framing the world

Alina Siegfried
7 min readMay 11, 2020
Photo by Joyce Adams on Unsplash

Disaster was narrowly averted in our household this past weekend — just.

After six weeks of a sort of strange, pandemic-induced Groundhog Day, waking up each day and trying to come up with new home-based activities to do with two lively preschoolers, while also trying to get in some work time, I’ve entered a surreal parallel universe where the boundaries of time have become hazy at best. Just as over the summer holidays of long, relaxing hours spent in enjoyment you might find yourself asking, What day is it?, my days have all been blurring into one as of late.

As a consequence, I spent a good portion of Friday thinking that it was Saturday already. Our son’s fourth birthday was on Sunday, which incidentally was also Mother’s Day, so a day of celebrations all round. Being a day ahead of myself, I spent all afternoon excitedly telling him that the following day was his birthday. I even put him to bed around 7.30pm with hearty encouragement to enjoy his last sleep as a three year old, and that in the morning, he would be a big four year old. He went to sleep with a smile on his face.

And then my partner came home from her parents place, where she had begun…

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Alina Siegfried
Alina Siegfried

Written by Alina Siegfried

Storytelling | Narrative | Systems Change | Circular Economy | Spoken Word | Author of “A Future Untold” on story & narrative for change | www.afutureuntold.com

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