Playdate Party

On Saturday we had plans to meet some friends of Andrea's from her teaching program for a late afternoon get together/play date (Andrea's friends have a son, Jonathan, who is about 6 months older than Fiona). A few highlights from the day:

• When Fiona started complaining about going down for her nap after lunch, we told her that she needed to rest up because when she woke up from her nap, we were going to go to a party. This proved not to be the wisest tack, as Fiona wound up sleeping for only 45 minutes instead of her usual 90-120. When she woke up, the first thing she said was "I go to party!" Yep, she was so excited by the word "party" that she shortened her nap.
  
  
• After we explained that we couldn't leave for the party yet, since she'd taken a much shorter nap than we expected, Fiona kept repeating "I go to a party" as she played with her play-doh. We realized that "party" might not have been a good word to use at all, since Fiona seemed to be under the impression that this was going to be a birthday party (the only kind she knows), rather than a get-together where the adults are terribly boring while they drink wine and nosh cheese while a couple of kids who don't know each other are asked to share toys. So we quickly started substituting the word "get together" and explained to Fiona that we were going to go see some friends of Mommy's. Fiona then spent the whole car ride out to Long Island repeating "go see friends of Mommy."
  
  
• I've written about how Fiona's really starting to differentiate genders as her princess phase gets underway. So I was amused to see that the first thing Jonathan did when he showed off his toys was to take two trucks and ram them into each other. Gender coding is powerful stuff.
  
  
• Fiona's obviously had plenty of experience playing with other kids at day care, but it was fun for us to watch her play with another kid. After a few minutes of shyness they started playing... well, not together, but next to each other. Part of that was because they were each interested in different things--Fiona was interested in the stuffed animals and crayons, while Jonathan focused more on his trucks and trains. But there was much less shock on Fiona's part when Jonathan wanted to play with a toy she'd been playing with than there was a few months ago when I saw her playing at day care.
  
  
• Toward the end of the party get-together, Jonathan and Fiona did play together when they decided to start racing across the laundry room. Both toddlers were strongly of the opinion that their parents should not watch them run, so we missed most of the action (we were able to see them hit the finish line, so it's not like they were left completely unattended).
  
  My favorite moment was listening to Jonathan shout "I won" as he reached the end first (as he always did, being bigger than Fiona). But Fiona doesn't quite have the basics of competition down, so once she reached the end she followed Jonathan by shouting out "I won!"
  
  Jonathan tried to protest, but Fiona didn't care. And good for her, I say.