My son Asher wanted to make a fruit tower for breakfast. He came to me in the bathroom, as I was doing my hair.

“Where are the cherries?”

“In the fridge, behind the lettuce.”

“And can I use the lemons and limes?”

“No, those are Angela’s.” We are staying at her house in Vienna, Austria, and the countertop is filled with her food and ours.

He returned to the kitchen, and began to assemble his tower out of bananas, apricots and cherries. I could almost see what he had in his head, this image of a teetering tower of fruit, perhaps in the shape of a monkey or a parrot. I knew, but didn’t say, that it might not live up to his vision.

Like the other day, when we were at our apartment in Paris and he absolutely wanted to make a roller-coaster. A roller-coaster inside the apartment. He worked all morning, pulling together sheets and pillows and poufs. (He was laughing at the word pouf. “Pouf!” he’d say, and laugh.) He wanted something that would spin and turn and go places, but this was an apartment after all, and the only materials he had at his disposal were borrowed linens and a floating staircase.

In the end, the roller-coaster was sheets down the staircase, with poufs at the bottom.

“I’m going!” he announced, “Come watch me! And then you can take a ride, too, for 25 cents.” He sat on a pillow. We all watched.

He went, bump. Down one stair. Bump, down another. We applauded. He looks a little dejected, but not much, not as much as I expected.

“That wasn’t quite what I had in mind,” he said.

Now he’s slicing fruit — bananas and apricots and cherries — for his fruit tower. “Here it is!” he says, holding up his fruit tower. It is more of a low-lying fruit salad without form or function.

“It’s not what I thought it would be,” he says, before sitting down to eat the entire thing. “But it tastes delicious!”

Last week, back in Paris, the day before the roller-coaster incident, we were in the Louvre. It was the end of a long and tiring day. The Louvre was hot, steamy and crowded. We had already worked our way through the impressionists at the Musee d’Orsay, and the kids were quite finished with art. But up ahead was Da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa," and we were crowding into the large room with every other tourist in Paris.

In the distance, "Mona Lisa" sat small and indifferent in her frame. The tourists were 15 deep, and Asher couldn’t see over the crowd.

“I want to get close,” he said. “I want to get a picture with the 'Mona Lisa.'” He threaded his way through the crowd, clutching my phone, glancing back occasionally to make sure I was right behind him. It took time for people to tire of their 53 selfies and move on. Asher inched forward, closer, closer.

Finally, he was at the front. There were still two barriers between him and the painting, but he had an unobstructed view. He lifted the phone and, snap.

Only later, after we had worked our way out of the room and to a bench in the hallway, did we gather around to examine the picture. It featured Asher, from the nose up, the Mona Lisa far in the background, like an afterthought.

He laughed the way only a 10-year-old can, doubled over, tears in the corner of his eyes. “All that work,” he cackled. “That’s not at all what I was going for.”

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I haven’t read any of the books about resiliency, and I’m not quite sure it can be taught in the way we think, sprinkling mantras on children like olive oil on a salad. For some it seems innate, an armor they’re born with.

But if parents are to learn things from their children (and I do believe that is one of the greatest gifts of parenting), this is what I’ve learned from Asher: Sometimes we find ourselves thunking through life on what we thought would be a roller-coaster, only to find that it is, in fact, a bedsheet down the stairs.

In moments like these, there is really only one thing to do. We shrug our shoulders and say, “That didn’t turn out the way I thought.”

And then we laugh.

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