I’m sitting on my porch, writing on my laptop, watching and listening to my son play with a friend.  Everything is a virtual peeing contest between the two of them.  Inevitably, their playing turns into smacking and laughing, then harder smacking, soon there’s less laughing, now they’re punching, and finally someone stops the game.  And back to racing the matchbox cars.

And then it dawned on me.  THIS is why he doesn’t play well with girls.  Well, more specifically, his sisters.  His sisters don’t play like this, but he expects them to.  He tries to play like this with them.  I’ll let you imagine how that plays out.

Oftentimes, these incidents end with lessons like this…

Me to the girls: Eli doesn’t have anyone to play with.  You need to find a way to include him and not expect him to play the way you do.

Me to Eli: The girls don’t like the way you’re playing, you can’t walk in and destroy everything.  You can try to join in with what they are doing, or you can do something else.  You cannot be Godzilla all over the place.

And Ada just thinks we should get Eli a brother.  Right, because adding ANOTHER child into the mix would certainly alleviate all of our problems.