Friendship
As many of you know, we share our nanny, Emily, with our next door neighbors (a wonderful arrangement that I can’t say enough about). They have 2 kids, KS, who’s 7, and CS, who’s 14. SPL and KS have gotten to be great friends and I think both their age difference and their birth order help as KS is almost 5 years older, but is the youngest in her family — so playing with SPL gives her the opportunity to be the "big sister."
So today, both of KS’s parents are working and she didn’t have school, so she came over to play with SPL and Emily. I got home at 2 pm thinking SPL may (or may not) be asleep, and KS would be "faking a nap" quietly on the couch (which she was). (KS and I had "hatched" this plan over the weekend which had her saying
"I’m going to take a nap here on the couch while you go sleep in your
room with Emily…." She was a great actor and I think she appreciated
being "in cahoots" — but SPL just was in one of his "no nap" modes.
:-).
My plan when I get home is usually to sneak in the house from the garage so as not to make too much noise and disrupt any falling to sleep that might be going on in SPL’s room. So I stuck by my plan today and found KS lying quietly on our couch and heard SPL chatting excitedly in his room with Emily (a relatively clear sign that there would be no nap. Though Emily is a miracle worker some days — I have to give her much credit. 🙂
after a few minutes (though I know Emily and SPL had been trying for probably 30-45 previous minutes), SPL and Emily came out of his room — no nap.
The ever-resourceful KS turned to SPL after a couple of minutes of us chatting and said, "Wanna go to my house and play?" And SPL didn’t miss a beat — "Yep!" And the next words out of his mouth were, "Let’s get our shoes on :-)." Emily agreed that this would be fun, so they put on their shoes and off they walked down our sidewalk, hand-in-hand, to KS’s house to play.
Who needs a nap when you’ve got a friend like KS?