Brain Leap

I might as well title this blog, Events Occuring at the Park, because everything seems to happen there. Today, while climbing the jungle gym a rather unruly twerp protested my kids being on there with him. It is my policy to not interfere with kid-kid interactions unless it becomes absolutely necessary. He yelled in my sons face (who raised an eyebrow and continued on his way), he hissed at my daughter (which caused her to look away and run). These actions are typical toddler brat things and are not that big of a deal.

Then...he ran over to my daughter and began hitting her in the face and on the chest. She stood there helplessly blinking and when he stopped she looked at me and completley melted. I picked her up and held her. I made sure she didn't get scratched during the attack and tried not to stare directly at the mother who was mortified at what her 3 year old kid just did to a "baby".

After saying to her child that it is not nice to hit, in a sing-song voice likened to that of asking for cookies, she looked at me and apologized. I said, you don't need to apologize, you didn't hit her. This was my sarcastic, subtle que that maybe she should get her son to apologize for her actions. She didn't get it and took her son over to the side and gave him a juice box to distract him for a bit. Had this been my child, we would have been on our way back to the house immediately. I'm pretty tolerant of most of their "bad behavior" but I don't tolerate hitting.

My poor little girl has been chased, doused in water, and beaten all in the past couple of days by other children. Today though, something different happened. Developmental leaps are when the brain kind of goes haywire and finally jumps higher up the learning scale. They are very bizare because you kid can go from not knowing how to put two toys together one day, to the next day doing it with ease like they always knew how. Same with language..."ahhhhh" because "kitty cat" one day.

Tonight, after her ordeal, my daughter was a different person. She was singing to herself, diving through my legs and instructing me how to give her a bath. She had a different quality about her voice as well. Could the trauma of being hit so hard by another kid have snapped a wire in her brain? She also goes through these dramatic changes post-vaccinations. The day after her shots she is always a very bizarre baby and I have no idea who she is. I've always attributed it to her being ill from the shots, but it could be the trauma of the event that snaps her little brain.

It's very weird but I'm curious if anything like that has ever happened to one of you.