Thoughts on a Child
Erin Douglass
Play DateMarch 2007
Sunday afternoon Roxy had her first play date.
This is apparently how childhood socializing now takes place — as scheduled swatches of time on Mom or Dad's Palm Pilot. I'm okay with this approach, because we have yet to meet any neighborhood children at the park or on our walks. Plus, at a little over one year the little girl isn't about to head outside on her own to make friends.
On Sunday our play pals — co-worker Anne and her rose-lipped, slightly square-headed ten-month-old Emily — arrived in a flurry of babyphrenalia.
After a hesitant first hour, Roxy and Emily were soon staring at one another in the Pack n' Play — the padded, portable play zone erected in our living room and filled with an assortment of oddball items, including:
- a Black Knight action figure with Velcroed, bloody-stumped limbs courtesy of my sister,
- an original Cabbage Patch doll (pastel Infant variety) likely found at Goodwill by my mother-in-law,
- a yellow blanket knitted by our neighbor Frances up the hill ("If there's a dropped stitch, it's because the Kings didn't score," she explained upon presentation), and
- a scratch-n-sniff Christmas board book from Roxy's daycare.
Undeterred by the clutter, Emily held a long striped ribbon. Roxy gripped a plastic red bowl and spotted ball. Something about that ribbon, or that bowl and ball, suddenly got one of them giggling. The other followed with a shriek.
"They're interacting!" I burst. "That's amazing!" Anne and I watched, elated, as our daughters grinned at one another.
And then the moment was over and Roxy was up, teetering on the soft surface of the Pack, poised to fall upon her smaller and still quite new friend.
After a bottle break, the girls tried to rip Elmo's head off the Sesame Street activity center, watched our cat Betty make a bed in Roxy's crib, and then napped as Anne and I pushed them in matching strollers up and down the hills of Mt. Washington in the late afternoon sun.
Not bad for a first play date.