A little heartwarming on a cold winter's night.

Today we had the pleasure of looking after my friend's two children for the afternoon. Will and Charlotte are lovely kids with friendly personalities and sweet and generous natures. They came around lunchtime and left after dinner and that's about all I saw of them!! ;D The children all played together ALL DAY LONG! Even Jack managed to spend the day with them and NOT drive them crazy by climbing all over them or beating up Jessie! Jack has a hard time expressing his desire to play and most older children want to play with Jessie and don't want much to do with Jack at all. He gets frustrated by this and since his verbal skills aren't good enough why he goes with the physical instead. People get the point really fast when he knocks them to the floor and sits on them!! To be fair he only really does that to Jessie, but it sure shocks the heck out of her friends! And when I say that they get the point, they don't. Not really. They think "Wow. That kid is mean, and weird...! Best stay the heck out of his way...!! " and it's not a rare thing for me to find the children all running, screaming away from Jack as he runs after them growling and being a "monster" at least happy to be in the game whilst not realising what his actual part is. It breaks my heart.

We do have some friends who have children who play nicely with Jack. Alicia's kiddoes are wonderful with him and JackSTER and JackFELLA get along swimmingly the more they get together. Of course, with them living in Minnesota, it's not as often as we'd like. *sigh*. Truthfully all of the children who come here are kind and considerate to Jack for the most part and the onus falls on ME to make sure Jack learns how to play with others. It's a learned skill, not something that always comes naturally. As he is out of sync behaviour wise with his peers sometimes it's frustrating for us all. Jack wants to play with the big kids but he is closer, mentally, to the smaller ones.

Eh, he'll get there. I shouldn't worry too much about it all I'm sure. I'm just saying it warms my heart to see him playing WITH other children and to see others playing with him.

That's all. Just a little heartwarming.