Rewards

Membership has its privileges. Jackson's latest thing is maybe among his most wonderful. His walking has gotten to the point where he will occasionally attempt dashing. He will also play with things by himself, and then turn around to make sure we are still there. Then, often times, once he sees one of us, he will run across the room and at the last minute lift up his arms so we can scoop him up and give him some lovin. It is adorable. He did this several times today at the mall play area. He would wander away behind some of the big rubber dinosaurs, play a bit, then turn around to see where I was, and run over and grab my leg.

There was also an incident at the mall. There is a particular feature of the play area on the wall...a disc that has plastic sprinkles inside and when you turn it, the sprinkles fall all inside the disc. Jackson loves it. Today he had waited his turn to play with it, and this little three or four year old kid marched over and essentially shoved Jackson out of the way. My boy did not fall down, he did not cry. I was about 20 feet away and started walking over because I knew what was coming next. Little 28 inch tall, 22 pound Jackson wound up and stiff armed this kid right in the chest. I got there about 2 seconds before four year old socked him a good one, and to be honest, once I was there Jackson was a little upset.

My feelings about this incident are mixed. Obviously the last thing you want your kid to do is hit. But I also don't want him to tolerate being bullied and pushed out of the way by this kid either. I'm not saying socking a kid in the face is good, but I think there are times I would rather he stick up for himself than come running for me or Jason. It's a small issue at school now that he went from being king in the castle in infant 2 to the youngest and smallest kid in toddler 1. He' s not interested in being low man, and he's not going to put up with people taking away his toys or pushing him around in there either. So it's something we'll continue to monitor and help him figure stuff out, but again...I'm not that upset that he sticks up for himself. I think that's cool.

Sidenote: soon after I picked up Jackson we went to another part of the play area. When Jackson wandered back over to the disc that had caused this conflict, this kid's older sister who was like maybe 5 years old says, I'm very sorry but a minute ago my brother was not nice to that boy. It was so adorable. She had been chastising him for about two minutes about being nice to the baby. Then his mom showed up with the 9 month old baby...and I thought to myself, "Now I know why this kid is hitting mine...middle child."