Grannadaddy is, of course, a baseball enthusiast. Anyone who's heard more than 5 of his sermons would know this about him, as would anyone who's had more than about 5 conversations with him. So I was glad that Evie could experience her first in-person baseball game with her grandfather who is such an avid fan of the sport. Evie sat next to Grannadaddy for part of the game and he was able to answer her questions about what was happening (something I couldn't have done - the love of baseball skipped a generation with me).
It was a pleasant way to spend a slightly muggy but mostly nice-weathered evening. I couldn't pick just one picture.
She's starting to look so grown up!
Last week, we went to see the new Disney Nature movie, which included the story of a snow leopard who is trying to provide for her two cubs. After being ousted from her territory by an invading group of leopards, and having hurt her paw stumbling over a sharp rock, the mother snow leopard makes a desperate move and tries to pick off a calf from a herd of horned yaks. The mother yak attacks, repeatedly hitting the leopard with her horns until she injures her enough that the mother leopard lets go of the baby. The mother leopard dies from her injuries.
This was obviously upsetting to Evie and was one of the reservations I had in taking her to a movie without having seen it first, but it has proven to be a good reference in perspective taking, which is something we've needed to talk about recently. Evie had an instance at school where she was told by another group of girls that they didn't want her to play in their game, but Evie also told me in a separate conversation that she and her good friend Sasha don't want certain people to play with them when they play a particular game. So I tried to explain to her that when she and Sasha ask others not to play, she has to understand that that's exactly what happened to her with the other playgroup. I'm trying to give her the perspective that it's okay to want to just play with the friends you want to play with sometimes, but that you should be nice about letting others know that you want it to be just the group already involved, and that sometimes you do need to include people. I'd like her to learn that there's a balance because I feel often that girls in particular are expected to include people all of the time and grin and bear it. I don't want her to feel like that. But I want her to also understand if the tables are turned and she is sometimes excluded.
Anyway, my point was, Evie's been asking about why the yak was so mean to the snow leopard, and Seth and I have been trying to explain to her that she wasn't mean, and that it depends whose perspective you're taking as to who the "good guy" is (ultimately I'm trying to steer her away from the idea of good guys vs. bad guys because, largely, that isn't something we encounter with real people). So we said, if she had been following the mama yak's story instead of the leopard's, she would have been glad that the mama was able to fend off the "mean" leopard and protect her baby.
That still didn't quite land and Evie asked if the yak meant to kill the leopard on purpose. We tried to explain that the yak only had horns so there's a limit to how much a yak can do when it thinks its baby is in danger, but that still caused confusion for Evie. So Seth said, "Let me put it this way. If a snow leopard came up and attacked you, you can bet that Mama would try to kill it." I said, "Yes, absolutely." Seth said, "And I would too. We'd do everything we could to kill it." Evie thought about that and said innocently, "But then you two would get dead." Not a lot of faith in our abilities to beat off a snow leopard, which is probably fair.
No comments:
Post a Comment