At the moment it is how proud I am of my 6 year old. Calm down, it's not a bumper sticker story.
We lost her dad 2 years ago and my father-in-law lives alone in the UK. Money is incredibly tight but loved ones pulled together so we could afford to visit him (he's getting on and she's the only living family left for him). During the visit, my husband's best friends discovered that my daughters dream was to see the Eiffel Tower. We had one day in London before we flew back to the states, and they bought us a train ticket to spend the day in Paris and make her dream come true. I didn't tell her where we were going, only that we had to get up early and it was going to be awesome.
The plan was to walk to the tube station to get to the Pensarn station +5 miles away from our hotel. The front desk staff were very helpful with directions for the morning journey, but left out the part that the trains don't run that time of the morning. We got to find that out for ourselves.
We walked to the nearest bus stop but were turned away as we didn't have an Oyster card. We flagged a cab and asked how much it would be and he said 27 quid, but we only had 20 for the entire rest of our trip. We started walking to where the nearest Oyster card station was and it was out of order.
It was 5:25am, and our train left at like 6:50am. At this point we had already walked almost a mile so I told her where we were going and asked if she was up for walking to the station or if she wanted to just go back to the hotel and sleep. She basically said she would walk all the way to Paris if she had to, so we consulted our map and off we went. She walked briskly the whole way, never complained once. The whole train ride there she kept saying "I can't believe I am going to see the Eiffel Tower" and was close to tears at times.
We get there and I took the online advice to get off the train at Trocadero and the look on her face as we rounded the corner of the station and the tower came into view was priceless. We bought a very overpriced ham and cheese sandwich on fresh bread that was in fact delicious, sat on the grass and stared at it for hours. She kept saying "I can't believe I'm eating a sandwich in front of the Eiffel Tower". It was cold, windy, and so foggy you couldn't see anything behind the tower, but she was over the moon.
On our way back, a busker was doing his thing in the train station. She stopped and danced and he put her name in a song. She asked if we could put a euro in his hat and I said yes, but then we can't afford the souvenir she saw on the way in that she wanted. She said that's ok because she will remember this day without one and this song was a better souvenir. She has learned what took me until my 20s to realize, the things that are important in life aren't things.
She was so full of gratitude and patience throughout this (probably once in her lifetime) experience and I'm so proud of my kid right now.