Gratuitous Domestic Posting (TM)

This morning I was chatting with my six year old about her big sleepover party tonight. (I wasn't feeling up to taking the child to her soccer game (ah-choo!), so the Butcher's Wife sportingly offered to sub for me. This is why I'm able to rant about deer and other matters this morning.)

Anyhoo, it turns out that of the three guests, one can't come until after dinner and one needs to go home later this evening. Only one of the girls is going to be here for the entire time. "You see," said my daughter,"she's the only one who doesn't have anything else on her schedule."

The B.W. and I looked at each other.

Now, we are in no way the kind of parents who believe in micromanaging every last second of our kids' lives, jamming them full of activities from dawn til dusk and using Excel spreadsheets and cell phones to keep track of everyone and everything. And we certainly don't use that kind of language to describe their day to day life. (I hate the word "playdate," for example.) But we live in a community that is immersed in this way of thinking and the child evidently is picking up the lingo from her little friends.

I'm not worried so much about the language, frankly, as I am that the kids will somehow also start feeling that there is something wrong if they aren't engaged in wall-to-wall planned activities like their peers. The ability to amuse themselves by themselves in what the so-called professionals call "unstructured time and settings" is one of the most precious we can hope to bestow on them. So far, I think we're doing pretty well. But these little incidents demonstrate the kind of competition we face.