Spain Dad, a baby blog

Empty Bucket at Punta Del Este by longhorndave.

Alleke stood at the entrance to the playground swinging her bucket of sand toys.

“Where would you like to play?” I asked, pointing out the various groups of kids busy raking and scooping sand into buckets.

Alleke hesitated, then ran across the playground and sat down in the far corner by herself. I walked over and sat down on a bench as she dumped out all of her toys.

I wondered why she wanted to play by herself instead of with the other kids.

Later after a little boy named Alvaro had introduced Alleke to his toy snake, which was made of wood links and painted orange, and they made a game of pushing the snake down the slide and giggling, Alvaro took Alleke by the hand, and they ran off to where one of the groups of kids was playing with sand toys. Alvaro sat down in the sand between two kids and picked up a rake.

Alleke frowned.

“Here, Alleke,” I said, walking over and picking up a shovel none of the other kids were using and handing it to her. She looked at it for a while, studied the kids, and then took a few steps away and sat down.

I watched her dig a hole for a while before I sat down next to her in the sand.

“Why don’t you want to play with the other kids anymore?” I asked.

Alleke stopped digging and looked up at me. “Because I don’t like those kids,” she said.

I nodded my head in thought. “Why don’t you like those kids?” I asked.

“Because they take my toys,” she said.

She was right, actually, and what she meant wasn’t just that the kids used the toys she wasn’t playing with, but that most of the time they walked over and grabbed the toy she was playing with right out of her hands.

Playing with toddlers is rarely fair after all. It seemed Alleke had weighed the situation carefully and decided that it was not worth the hassle to play with other kids if it meant they would take her toys and she wouldn’t be able to fill her bucket with sand anymore.

Whether Alleke liked it or not, however, life is full of all kinds of people, which seemed so obvious as I looked beyond the playground to the square where adults sat around tables chatting and drinking their tinto de veranos and a pack of teenage boys chased after a soccer ball and the younger boys sprayed themselves with water trying to fill their water balloons from the water pump and of course the girls stood by giggling at them with their hands over their mouths. We can’t opt out, I thought to myself, because life is about relationships.

I thought about how many times I wished I could have (or actually did) opt out of a friendship or avoided a co-worker or ignored the stranger who needed help. But, it’s the people we rub shoulders with every day that give us the opportunity to grow and make ourselves better people.

As we walked home, I decided that the following day we would leave our sand toys at home. If Alleke wanted to play in the sand, she would learn that other kids, and their sand toys, might be worth the hassle.

For more, read about a lesson I learned at the playground…