Do you listen to your children?

Last week my 5 year old son had a mufty day at school in order to raise products to put in the hampers to be raffled off at the Christmas plays. As he was getting ready for school he told me that he had to wear "a Christmas theme". Now as I was on the PTFA committe who had arranged the day and as we had agreed upon no theme, I said "no I don't think so". He said "yes Mummy, my teacher said we had to wear something Christmassy." I confidently told him that wasn't right and proceeded to bundle him off to school. I later pulled up at his school to drop off my daughter at preschool and saw immediately that the majority of children had on Christmas hats, or something similar. I felt terrible, and even more so on being told by a parent that the children who had dressed up were getting a star!! Poor Jamie, he had got it right and I had just not listened to him. As it happened I managed to borrow a hat from the preschool for him. Nevertheless, I continued to mull over this during the day. I realised that I need to listen to others more, as I have a tendency to have confidence in my own opinion when I have good reason to believe that I am right. However, what I fail to do is consider that something may have changed. There were 2 lessons for me in this incident - one was to consider that things can change and new information can occur, and the second was that I really should listen to my son..he may be young, but he is sensible and truthful and I should always try to pay proper attention to what he has to say.