As a dad, I am always worrying about the things I’m passing on to my kids. Am I teaching them the right lessons, showing them how to be wise adults, instilling in them the best values?

It’s impossible to tell, day to day. Raising kids is a little like growing bamboo; you plant it, and you water it, and you tend to it day in and day out, but for years — years! — you get no outward sign of the plant’s progress. Kids, meanwhile, are angels one day, demons the next. Their moods can swing like pendulums on things as inconsequential as the order you buttoned their jackets in. So there’s really no telling how things are going in their little heads.

Until your oldest brings home his Thanksgiving project from preschool.

If you can’t read it, that says “I am thankful cause I give mommy and daddy highfives.”

I could quibble with the grammar, but I won’t. (Yes, I will. It should say “because” or, at the very least, have an apostrophe before “cause”; Mommy and Daddy should really be capitalized; and high-fives should be hyphenated.)

That picture up there tells me I’m doing something right.

Excuse me while I take a victory lap and then high-five my son at the end of it.