By Kim Fernandez 

My daughter, like, I’m betting, many of your kids, has been hounding me for weeks to buy her a fidget spinner—this year’s biggest toy fad. Having survived the Rainbow Loom and affiliated rubber shrapnel in every crevice of the house, Zhu Zhu pets, Silly Bandz, and a litany of Happy Meal toys, and with both kids’ schools having banned the things, I put my foot down and said no. Over and over and over.

Earlier this week, I heard her outside (in the rain) rustling through the plastic-and-glass recycling bin. She came in with three plastic bottle caps (which she washed), foraged two felt furniture-foot pads out of the kitchen catch-all drawer, and vanished upstairs. Half an hour, a visit to Pinterest, a hunk of duct tape, and a toothpick later, guess what? She’d made herself a pretty darned functional fidget spinner. Score one for the daughter.

Ingenious? Yeah. Creative, too, and a nice workaround to her big roadblock–that would be me. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed. And when I told a friend about it later,  her response was, “Somebody is going to be very glad they hired her one day. That girl is going places.”

My friend, I think, is right. And here’s the lesson I’m taking from it: Next time there’s a roadblock trying to separate you from a goal, are you going to take it? Or are you going to find what you need to make your want happen?

Kim Fernandez is IPI’s director of publications and editor of The Parking Professional.

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