Little Life Lesson

Some­times being a par­ent is gratifying.

Today, when the boys were get­ting a bit too ram­bunc­tious, I sug­gested the boys go play out­side. Both of their faces imme­di­ately fell, and I knew some­thing was up. They told me that they didn’t want to go out­side, because the lit­tle girl who lived next door wasn’t their friend any­more. This girl is the light of their exis­tence. They will be dead set on doing noth­ing but loll on the couch and be slugs, but the sec­ond they hear her voice out­side they dis­ap­pear, bare­foot and all.

I knew good and well they’d all been play­ing bad­minton together Fri­day evening, and I’d won­dered why Sat­ur­day was such a big indoor day for every­one. I dug a lit­tle deeper. Piec­ing together the two ver­sions of the tale, the boys had got­ten car­ried away with play­ing in the autumn leaves. They threw the leaves over her head one too many times, and she got fed up. She announced that since she didn’t have any friends that would play with her, she wasn’t play­ing out­side any­more. Both of the boys just accepted this as their due for cross­ing the line. They both expressed remorse, but they informed me that their apolo­gies hadn’t worked that day, so that was that. They’d lost a friend.

I was hor­ri­fied at how eas­ily they let her go. Clearly they were both sad at the loss.  They didn’t want to even think of play­ing out­side unless there was a chance she might be there. They were embar­rassed that they’d hurt her feel­ings, and didn’t want to “bug” her anymore.

It was clearly time for a life les­son, one that lots of grownups I know need as well. I sug­gested that per­haps Next Door Girl actu­ally might be miss­ing them. Surely, there was a chance she could be per­suaded to be their friend again. They were very skep­ti­cal, but agreed to try to win her back. I let them mas­ter­mind the plan, and they decided to write her a card ask­ing for for­give­ness. Red Chief even added a Toot­sie Pop from his dwin­dling Hal­loween stash. She didn’t answer the door, so they left it on her mat and waited.

I was so wor­ried that this would back­fire on me.  I dis­tracted them with the movie Nau­si­caä, and crossed my fin­gers that all would end well.  Within an hour, two lit­tle boys were rewarded for their per­sis­tence. This note had been left on OUR doormat:

I for­give u can u come out side p.s. thanks for the suc­cer

All was right with the world again. The movie was for­got­ten, and they even left the door open in their scram­ble outside.