The Pushing Game

We have children running in and out of our house all the time.   We're fortunate to live on a street with a good number of children close in age to my son and daughter.  Some parents want their children to play outside during good weather and some would prefer no screen-based activities.   But on the whole, all the parents on the street are of similar mind which makes it nice for both the parents and the children.

We have other children here at our house more than we have our children at other homes.   We get to see a lot of the social dynamics and have watched as they've developed from pre-verbal, crawling on the floor state to today's complex gameplay, negotiating and conflict.

I don't think any of the children that know my daughter well are unkind to her because she can't see.   Yes, they can take advantage of her lack of sight, but for the most part they all seem to treat her as an equal where possible and provide accommodations where needed.   Sometimes this is hard for my daughter because there is a game she wants to play and simply can't because she would need sight to play.  The other children aren't trying to exclude my daughter because they don't like her, but it's hard for them to explain it without hurting her feelings.

Or at least that's what I've seen in many cases.  Sometimes my daughter can annoy her friends.   She can be incorrigible, stubborn and strong-willed and her personality can clash badly.   And then there are times when the children play together well, no one is crying, no one has been hurt and we don't have to intervene to make sure things are safe.

Yesterday I saw something from the window of my bedroom that was happening on the trampoline that alarmed me.   Two boys my daughter doesn't play with that often were on the trampoline with her.   My son had come inside and what I saw was the two boys running away from her and then, when she got close to them, they would shove her.  

She would go down but would get back up again, put her arms out and try to find them once more.   What was going on?   This seemed wrong.   They were moving away from her, knowing she couldn't see them.   She wanted to catch them, or grab them or something—perhaps in anger, but when she got close they pushed her over.

And yet my daughter was smiling and laughing.   As I was going to check on her to see if she was okay, I saw my son in the living room and asked him about it.   He said, "They're playing the pushing game.  She loves it."  And so she did.  She came inside happy.

The Big Boy Update:  This morning I yelled up to my son to get dressed and come down.  I had called him down twice before.  He groggily called out, "I'm sorry, Mom.  I dreamed I was getting dressed."   When we got in the car he told me the dream had gone all the way through getting to school before he woke up and found himself still in bed.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  On the way home from school my daughter said, "I miss swearing."   She said she knew she couldn't say the words out loud, but she was saying them in her head.