When I asked my four-year-old what she wanted to do this summer, she quickly and confidently replied, “I think I’d like to sail around the world.” Clearly, the media firestorm around 16-year-old, Abby Sunderland, has sparked the attention of my young adrenaline junky.

My response is the same as it always is when she decides she thinks something dangerous is appealing. I sigh and say, “Really.” And her response to my flatness is always ignored as she proceeds with a laundry list of reasons why it’s super cool to do dangerous stuff.

When she was two I was flipping through the channels and she saw a half-mili-second of something that caught her interest. She begged me turn back a few channels and then had me stop on an Olympic slalom ski jump of all things. The only words she could string together to express her excitement were. “Wow! Fun! Fun!”

She was born with an awareness about her that even my family doctor recognized as she emptied his shirt pocket while he leaned forward to look in her ears when she was only a few months old.

Then there was the time when she drove in her Grandma’s little red sports car and said, “Gamma go fasta!! C’mon fasta!!”

At six months of age she was trying to walk – which sounds adorable – but when you have a “danger lover” on your hands it really is a curse not a blessing. She’d troll around the playground and go down the tall twisty slide. I really couldn’t keep her from being who she was – a fun loving, thrill seeker. Yes, I had to keep her safe, but I realized that term had a new definition for my free-spirit.

Other moms would scorn, glare, or even lecture me about how irresponsible I was. I could empathize with them. At times, before the birth of this child, I probably felt some of those same judgmental feelings towards anonymous mothers at the park, the ones that seemed to let their kids do things that appeared to be too overwhelming at such a young age. Most of the time I’d blow them off and every once in a while one of those well-intentioned helicopter moms would try to hover over my child and I’d remind them to fly in their own designated airspace.

Now, I see the Sunderland family take on ridicule from the media and supposed parenting experts for letting their child take on such a difficult goal. I have to sit back and observe from a different place. I don’t know their circumstances, but I do know what it’s like to parent a child that has more zest for life than can be contained in a small body. There’s really more than one way to sail through the solo voyage of parenthood.