"Uh-oh!"

I hear this maybe 5,000 times a day.

Ruby drops her sippy cup. "Uh oh!"

She runs too fast and takes a header into the hallway. "Uh oh!"

She throws a slice of turkey against the wall. "Uh oh!"

But because I've become so accustomed to the phrase, I don't hear it as negative anymore.

She says "uh oh!" and I hear, "I'm experimenting!"

She says, "uh oh!," and I hear, "Ah ha! I'll do that differently next time!"

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes the "uh oh!" is very serious. Sometimes it means she just slipped on a plastic hanger on our wood floors and I'm certain she's dislocated the entire left side of her body. Sometimes it means tears. And yet in our house, the "uh oh!" always means she's trying something new; it means she's learning.

In our work we encounter "uh oh's all the live long day but most of us grimace at the sound.

Uh oh, that contract didn't go right.

Uh oh, the caterer fell through.

Uh oh, the coding wasn't clean.

Uh oh, I played the wrong note.

Uh oh's aren't things that went wrong, uh oh's are things we get to try differently next time.