Written back on March 13th.
I had a nice afternoon with Leilani yesterday, although there was one of those uncertain parenting moments.
Mommy had put her to nap and needed to get some work done, so I took over. I managed to get her back to sleep twice—she now likes being in the rocking chair and listening to my French songs. When she finally woke up, she didn’t cry and walked out of the bedroom by herself to find me. After sitting on the potty, she suggested “let’s go to the park,” which suited me because I wanted to take her jogging in the stroller on the way there.
On the way there, she wanted to go see the “donkeys” she had heard one evening. We can sometimes hear cows in the fields near our house, but she knows what donkeys sound like and she said she could hear them. I was fairly sure it was just her imagination, so I played along with her. Since there are no donkeys in our neighborhood, we went to see the horses and feed them for 15 minutes. For once the horses came over to the fence to be fed grass I picked nearby, and she loved feeding them herself. Then I got my 30 minutes of jogging around the neighborhood done, and as promised we ended up at the playground.
When I took her to the potty after a while, we saw an 8-yr old boy walk out of the bathroom with the roll toilet paper. I didn’t think much of it until we saw the boy and all his friends wrapping one of their bikes with the paper and I thought they were playing a joke on an unlucky friend. When I was 5, the big kids on my street took my Big Wheel and ripped the stickers off, which was traumatizing—but I couldn’t bring myself to yell at these kids.
Next, one of the kids had a lighter and lit the paper around a handlebar, while the owner of the bike rode around and the others watched. The wind from riding around made the fire spread, but without making big dangerous flames. So while I was even more tempted to intervene, I had to admit the kids were being rather ingenious. I had never done something like that when I was that age, but I was starting to wish I had thought of it.
I was aware that Leilani was sitting with me watching all this, but I just couldn’t think of what to do. On the one hand, I shouldn’t let her watch dangerous pranks, but she was amused watching the boys, the bicycles and the fire, so it would be hard to drag her away to play elsewhere. I was watching because I was both interested in what they were doing, seeing what kids these days do, and as the only adult around, trying to keep an eye out for safety. So I did lecture Leilani about the danger of fire and big boys on bikes, but I felt I couldn’t really make the kids stop, they would just go elsewhere and or stand up to me.
In the end, I did call out to them and tell them to stop making fire on the painted surface of the basketball courts because that would ruin it. They accepted this and moved to the grass for the big finale: lighting the paper under the seat of the bike and pedaling around. I have to admit this looked more dangerous and more impressive. I was worried the kid’s polyester shorts could melt, but the paper burned quickly and by riding around, the flames never touched the boy.
At one point, a small piece of burning paper blew onto the court, and Leilani stood up and tried to yell something about no fire on the court, trying to repeat what I had said. They didn’t hear her, but at least I felt she understood how fooling around could be both fun but dangerous and destructive. After that, the boys gave up and eventually biked off their separate ways. I never got the impression they were bad kids, just adventurous. Of course, it made me wonder in what ways will Leilani be adventurous at that age—hopefully she will have forgotten about this specific prank.
As Dr. Seuss famously asks at the end of The Cat in the Hat: “Well, what would you do?”
