May 1 These Girls!

Saturday:  When I came by today at 3:00 to pick up Kaity, Harper (her next-door neighbor) was over playing. Harper will be six pretty soon. She and her sister, Kenzie (almost 10) are Kaity's two best friends. They are very dear little girls! Having said that, they are also a force to be reckoned with--when they are together, that is. It seems that one at a time, they play quite well together with Kaity. But when BOTH are present, all kinds of ... more negative interactions occur.

As soon as I walked into Jesse's house, I encountered Harper and Kaity. Harper asked WHY I was there! I told her I was here to pick up Kaity and bring her over to my house to play. Immediately, Harper asked if she could come too. Sigh. It's not that I do not like extra children (exactly), it's just that I had not pre-planned enough food, activities, etc. for another child, plus I was kind of looking forward to having just Kaity over for four hours together--you see, Thursdays are Kaity's swim lessons and so our time together is always cut short because of that. Saturdays we get to enjoy a longer time together. 

I was able to finally get Kaity to where I could whisper and ask her if she WANTED Harper to come over and Kaity gave a definite YES answer. Long story shortened a great deal ... once Harper went next door to ask her mom's permission, Kenzie (who was doing homework in her room) also wanted to come. Sigh (again). Harper and Kenzie TOGETHER? They do not agree about a single thing! One of them is always unhappy because the other one is getting more attention, or we are not doing what they want at that exact moment in time!

Kaity forgets this in between times and just wants to share some happiness with her friends--and I totally understand that! But look at Kaity's face (below). We have been at my house a total of TEN minutes and already Kaity KNOWS this is not going well. Kaity is being bossed around by both Harper and Kenzie. Harper is whining that the other girls are "moving her stuff around" and Kenzie is chasing Matey-Bird all over the house.

At this point, there was really nothing to be done about it other than to try to placate all three girls and see if we could find some happy moments together.

I'm not sure I caught a single smile from Kaity the three hours we were at my house today. We did have about 20 minutes of fun playing a game I had checked out from the library. It's a little Quiz game with cool animal-sound answer buttons to push, etc. Kenzie kept winning all of the cards, much to Harper's very vocal dismay, and Kaity was pretty pouty about not winning as many cards as Kenzie. I had gotten out my new shark puppet, Sweetie, and introduced him to the girls prior to our game. Sweetie would bare his teeth at anyone who was being whiny and then the girls would laugh about it.

I did put on some children's music in the background (from I-tunes on my computer). I have a lot of fun children's songs, as well as mostly Christian kids' songs. They all recognized one they sing at Awana: "My God is SO Big, So Strong and SO Mighty!" Here is Harper doing the motions to the song.

Kenzie really enjoys little Matey-Bird--and Matey was very enamored with Kenzie too. He loved kissing her earrings and he landed quite often on her shoulders. Kenzie was very pleased about that.

I did cook up some hotdogs for the girls and got out fresh fruit and some chips and other fun stuff to eat. We all did okay with sharing our meal together. A lot of food was wasted, but there was nothing to be done about that! 

Soon it was time to take them back home. I will admit that I was relieved the three hours had passed without a major meltdown from any one of the three ... all of them are used to having things THEIR WAY as well as being quite allergic to the word, "No." But God doesn't shrink back from loving all of us whose hearts are bent completely in that same direction, does He? He seeks us--actually chases after us--welcomes us into His family, shares everything He has with us, and forgives our every single sin. My heart needs to be WAY MORE like His heart ... please Lord.