playdate with Nina

Liesl's sweet preschool friend Nina came over to play with us on Friday. We picked her up from her mom's office at PSU at 9:30 and she played until we dropped her off at 4:30. It was a wonderful day for the two girls and hopefully the first of many more playdates to come - I'd like to encourage this lovely friendship to last. (It's interesting to me to realize, as a parent, how much we are responsible for who she gets to play with - I have to commit to the friendship too - make the arrangements and do the driving and supervising. She gets to decide who she likes, of course, but it's up to me to connect with the parents and allow the friendship to flourish outside of school/class situations. I don't think that as a child I really understood how much influence my parents had.)

Our first stop was at Blue Star, where the girls split one blueberry and one chocolate doughnut. Big messy grins all around.

Then we drove up to Washington Park to play at the playground - some hide and seek, some following the leader, the swings, clambering around.

Then we came home for lunch - grilled cheese and blueberries and carrots with hummus - and the girls disappeared into Liesl's room for a few hours. They played with their babies (I think) and were happily tucked away up there, chattering away. I got some work done and Sebastian got to watch Paw Patrol (a Nickelodeon show about dogs solving mysteries, which is their current screentime obsession). And then, because it was 94 degrees out there, we turned on the sprinkler and they got to jump through and spray each other with water guns and dump water on their heads and everything else.