Heartache

Tough time at Park Day yesterday.

It was cloudy, damp and chilly so the crowd was small and there were only two other girls besides Katie. Katie will play with the boys, but once girls arrive she wants to play with them. One is a bit younger than Kate and the other is a few years older and the girls obviously know each other from home. The older one didn't want Katie to join them but instead of saying something, she led the younger girl to ditch Katie whenever she turned around. Kate was slow on the uptake and it took a few ditchings for her to get the message.

I hated seeing this play out. It's happened before and Katie keeps trying to join in with that crowd.

I was getting pretty upset and decided we'd just leave a bit earlier than planned. Kate had a playdate with an old school friend that afternoon, so I wasn't going to stay much longer anyway.

Katie, ofcourse got over the whole thing by the afternoon, but I've been agitated about it all night! Thought dumping it here might help. It's hard to tell when I should intervene and when I should let Katie learn via the school of hard knocks. Also don't want to project my feelings about being left out onto Kate.

I think I've decided, if it happens again, to pull the older girl aside and ask her to tell Katie that that she and her friend want to play alone right now, rather than running away. Then I'll try to lead Katie to a more inclusive groups of girls. I'd hate to cut out Park Day altogether. I enjoy the other parents and there's generally a mob of boys for Zack to run with. Perhaps we'll trade off with another group or simply leave earlier when there aren't friendlier options for Katie. We'll see.

Pete's been in Salt Lake City since Friday. Looking forward to him getting back late tonight. I wouldn't have tossed and turned over park day quite as much last night if he had been home.

We had a lot going on while he was gone, but I tried to keep it to manageable levels. Saturday, Katie's ballet class danced at St. Albans' bazaar. I passed on trying to fit in the Cub Scout food drive just before the dance call and when we were all feeling funky in the evening, passed on the Girl Scout dance and the UUCA auction.

Sunday I took the kids to RE at church and took a walk outside myself to get some alone time. Afterwards we went over to the Storks to play and then headed out late to go apple-picking. There weren't many apples left on the trees, but we found enough to make the kids happy and bought more to make pies.

Monday, I took the kids to my yoga class and they did schoolwork while I ohhmed. They also played around on the rec center playground and I ran into a PBS colleague's husband. Kate went to Brownies and Zack and I played legos.

Tuesday started with the 1s, 10s and 100s places--a concept we've been stuck on lately. I tried using buttons and columns, now we'll let it bake until next week. Then there was the dreaded Park Day incident, a play date,and while Katie watched a DVD on the portable player (love that thing), Zack went to Cub Scouts and I attended my first Civic Assoc. meeting.

And today it's chilly and cloudy. The kind of day I like to go back to bed. I think we'll cozy up with some books, do a little computer math and then maybe head over to the botanical garden and dream of Spring. Or, maybe we'll set up that fish tank that's been sitting in the living room empty. Thanks to Nanci and Louis for the freebie!