A Walk and A Squabble.

We started our walk around the Orakei Basin with an extremely cranky almost-two year old. She'd scream if you so much as looked at her wrong or suggested something she didn't like (like taking off her sandals, or something outrageous like carrying her.)

We soldiered on. We spotted cormorants catching fish, swimming and roosting. The tide was low in the basin and we saw the sluice gates open to let water in and fill up the basin. It was fascinating. We saw morning glory and I told them how it was my favourite flower as a child. Of course, their next step was to ask Papa to grow that in our garden for me.

We stopped for a break and these guys clambered right up this. All in, the walk took us almost two hours. It was ice cream weather so we stopped for some fresh fruit ice cream on the way home. Yum.

Our big boy got himself into trouble today. An older boy on our street was teasing him and calling him "baby". He carried on with the name-calling even though our big boy asked him to stop (probably didn't help that our big boy was smiling when he said "stop it").

Finally, our big boy chucked the swing seat in the boy's face in retaliation. That stopped the boy all right, and also made him cry.

Had our big boy walked away from that name-calling child, all would have been fine. By hitting out at the boy, he now bore responsibility for the retaliation. We all understood why he did it (and have probably considered doing something similar ourselves), but he still had to apologise for physically hurting the boy in his anger. 

Such a hard lesson to have to learn, but we told him he will encounter more of these people in his lifetime. While we cannot control how others behave, we can control how we respond to them. Hitting isn't okay, and in future, he needs to remember that he can remove himself from situation by walking away.

By the end of the day, the boys were playing together again. All in a day's work for the children on the lane.