Pizza Party

We hosted a pizza party for the neighborhood kids yesterday. We had all the usual suspects: Cooper, Kelsey, Sarah, Katie, Michael, and Emily. Everyone seemed to enjoy the pizza, watermelon, and the cookies stuffed with icing.

However, things went a little bit south shortly after the meal. In fact, Lily wasn't even done with her cookie when Cooper was rallying everyone to play hide-and-go-seek around the yard. Lily didn't really want to play it, so he told her that she wouldn't have to be "it." Yet by the time the game started she was "it." I asked Cooper about that after the round was over and he said that she raised her hand (or maybe it was that she didn't raise her hand).

Then Cooper was trying to lead everyone back to his house to play. Basically, they weren't playing what he wanted to play so they were going to ditch Lily's party. Amanda explained to them that it is rude to eat and then ditch the host like that. They played in the basement for a little while and then went out to the neighborhood to play. Meanwhile, Michael (age 3) and his sister Emily (2 1/2) were kind of left with Amanda and me since they couldn't really play with the big kids. Of course, we had Noah too.

After I put Noah to bed we found Lily sitting on the curb crying. Apparently she got ditched yet again after they were playing "cops" and she mysteriously was among the first "shot." The good news is that Katie came down to apologize. We had a talk with Lily to explain this deal with her friends.

What it seems to boil down to is Cooper is the ringleader and he doesn't really care that much about what Lily wants or feels. I'm not saying that he needs to think otherwise, but Lily needs to understand that he really is not on her side. We need to find a different boy for her to have her little crush on than Cooper. The thing is that Lily wasn't even trying to be bossy at all. Everything just seemed to happen around her and she had zero input. Some party, eh?

Hopefully she will have learned a little bit from this experience. Mere proximity is not necessarily the best reason for friendship.