Like Magic/Interactive Play

Alyssa sighed as Jaxon rolled around on the floor at 9:15 last night. She really wanted that boy to go to sleep because she wanted to do something on the computer and I told her she had to wait until the little kids (ha! Liv is 7 and Jax is 6, but in our house, they’re still the ‘little’ kids) were asleep.

Then, well, he just wouldn’t go to sleep. He kept mumbling, “I’m bored.”

Alyssa would reply, “If you’re bored, go to sleep, it will make the morning come faster.”

He’d just sigh and find something else to amuse him.

For the record, Olivia has been asleep for at least a half hour by that point.

When Alyssa rolled her eyes for the eleventy-hundredth time, I laughed and said, “Welcome to my world of waiting for one child or the other to go to sleep before I can do something I want.”

She scowled at me and threw herself against the couch, muttering to Jaxon, “Go to sleep.”

Finally, at 9:30, I realized that it wasn’t that the boy wasn’t tired. He’d yawned three times in the last two minutes. No, it was the television. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from it.

So, get this, I did something brilliant. I turned the television off. I know! Who’d have thought of something so creative?

And you know what? That boy was asleep not ten seconds later. It was as if the remote worked not only on the television but also on the child. Alyssa said happily, “It was like magic!”

She gleefully went to the computer, did her thing and ten minutes later, I was lugging the ‘little’ kids to bed.

Don’t ask why they weren’t already in bed if we were trying to get them to go to sleep. That would be too logical and I never, ever claimed to be logical. So yeah, just don’t.



I was making dinner for the three kids last night when I heard Olivia ask Jaxon, “Do you want to play husband and wife and baby?”

When he nodded that he did, indeed want to play her game, Olivia told him, “Okay, you get to be the husband, I’ll be the wife and we’ll go get a doll to be the baby. Maybe Lyssie will be the dog.”

After laughing over the fact that she wanted her big sister to be the family dog (Alyssa declined being the dog, instead, she declared she’d be the horse.) I sat back in the quiet realization that Olivia has achieved yet another amazing, wonderful social milestone.

For years she’s been stuck in parallel play. She loves to play beside kids but until very recently, she’s shown no interest in actually interacting with her peers.

I watched her play with Jaxon last night. They went from playing her game of “Husband, Wife and Baby” to his game of school, in which he was the teacher and got to tell the student, Olivia, what to do as Alyssa, the unruly horse ran around the room wreaking havoc on everyone and everything.

It was a beautiful thing to behold. My seven year old is finally more socially mature than most typical four year olds. It’s not as if I thought she’d never get to this point. The thing is, I wondered if she even wanted to get to this point. She’s always seemed so content to do her own thing, to watch others interact while she kept to herself, making up her own stories and playing her own games.

But now, these days, she’s seeking out the company of her peers. Well, she’s seeking the company of her cousin, a child she’s known her whole life. But this is a start, it’s a step in the right direction of her interacting with her classmates, her peers and yes, in my heart of hearts, I hope it’s a step toward her making friends. It will probably still be a while as she navigates this new world of interactive play but I’m so proud of her for getting to the start of it all.

I want so much for her. But above all, I want her to be happy, to feel content, to know she’s loved and for her to love others back. I want her to connect with people because even introverts (like me) need connections. It makes the world a much less lonely place.

Play on, sweet girl, play on.