We were hiking and the kids had climbed up this slab of granite and we told them to come down so we could keep going. We started to get going again, but as my little girl ran to join us, she went faster than her feet and fell forward onto the ground.

She cried and cried and she hurt. Her hands hurt and her feelings hurt and she was covered in dust. She kept crying for a long time as I picked her up and hiked onward.

How could I help her calm down? I thought if she could just get her breath for a moment, she would be able to move forward and be okay.

So in a desperate moment of trying to get my daughter to breathe instead of wail, I held up a few fingers and asked her to blow the candles out, pretending that my fingers were the candles.

When she blew on my fingers, I put them down. And we did it again with a different amount of fingers. She calmed down and she started breathing again, and became a very enjoyable game.