Remorse

I was exercising this morning while the kids were upstairs playing. I heard Owen start to cry, and I thought, "Oh great, Aiden hurt him again." I decided I would go check on him when I finished the exercise I was currently working on. (If you don't console him, he will continue crying and crying and crying. Sometimes he gets so worked up he throws up.) Then I heard Amelia yelling at me from upstairs. I couldn't tell what she was saying beyond "Mom!" Next thing I know, she is downstairs trying to tell me something. I picked her up and asked her what was wrong. She said (very slowly and deliberately), "I hurt Owen. Owen cry." We went upstairs, and through sobs, Owen told me Amelia had hit him in the head with a car. Amelia was pretty concerned about Owen. She really felt bad about hurting him.

Friendship

Today at lunch, Aiden asked me, "How do you end a friendship?" I told him if he was mean to his friends, they wouldn't want to be friends with him any more. Then I asked him why. He told me that a child in his Kindergarten class keeps calling him a baby and that he doesn't want to be friends with him any more. I just thought his question was a pretty mature question for a 5-year-old.