Social Play

The Big Boy Update: 
My son gets in trouble a lot when he plays.   I have a hunch it’s because his sister cries and tells on him, but it’s for reasonable cause a lot of the time because he’s hit her or called her names or won’t let her play and they’re intentionally excluding her.   A lot or most of the time it’s due to reasonable reasons, mostly instigated by her I would suspect, but since my husband and I aren’t there to see it happen, we don’t truly know, and so we try to help resolve things and invariably this causes my son to get in some manner of trouble or discussion with us on reasonable and kind behavior.

Tonight I went to a party at a friend’s house.   It was in another neighborhood where my son didn’t know any of the children save for meeting their two children once before briefly.   My husband wasn’t feeling well and he kept my daughter at home since it’s harder to navigate a busy and unfamiliar location with her vision.  

My son and I arrived to find boys in the front yard with nerf guns.  He opened his car door and ran off.   And that set the tone for the night.   He managed himself the entire night—about four hours—with zero incidents.  No one complained about him; no one cried and said he’d done something unkind or mean and he wasn’t upset at any of the other children.

On the contrary, I had parents tell me how he was being very nice to one of the much younger children.   My son played with lots of children across a good sample of ages and did so happily the whole time.   When he was hungry he came to find me and then got himself his own food (only letting the dog eat one or two of his self-prepared tacos).

We ended up staying until after ten o’clock because he was having such a positive, good time.  He and his sister love each other, but he told me on the ride home they’re frenemies.   I would have to agree.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter takes screenshots on her iPad.   Constantly.   I’m serious about this.   I went in and deleted them all yesterday without her knowing.   She intentionally takes the screenshots because she wants them—although we’re not sure why.   In three weeks she took 2963 of them.