I finally finished my banner today - but I enjoyed the process and still found plenty of time to relax and play this weekend. Luckily for me, Mia miscalculated her PVC frame, so I received the frame to use and custom-built my banner size to fit it (UNFORTUNATELY - my sewing machine completely died, so at least half of the banner border (it's 5' long and 3' tall) was sewn as I manually turned the knob. Yes, that took a long time!).I took the banner to practice today (I didn't want the coach to worry) and was immediately told by one of the little girls that hey, she had blonde hair! Whoops! So the final banner has two blond girls standing next to each other (they are standing alphabetically, to avoid any appearance of favoritism).
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, although I do have to roll the banner up with a sheet of wax paper over the girls' fingers. Without it... the fingers come off! Not good! We'll see how well this banner holds up when the Santa Anna winds start blowing (maybe we should just take it down!).
In other news... Marika had another horrible day at school. She was in tears because another child had come up to her (later I found out, she was with the girl who has been mean to her over the past week - so it makes me wonder if she put her up to it) and said, "you're on fire!" Of course that doesn't make any sense and I kept thinking that they must have been playing a game because why else would she say something like that? And anyway, I told Marika - "you're not on fire, so what's the big deal?" As that little girl was leaving, I stopped to talk to her daycare provider (whom I am acquainted with) and simply asked her, "I'm just wondering why you told Marika she was on fire?" I honestly thought she'd have a straight answer and everything would be fine (you know, like, "oh, we were playing firefighter!"). The girl refused to say anything and in fact, shied away from me. Her daycare provider just laughed it off and said, "oh, kids... they were probably playing, I'm sure it was no big deal! Ha ha ha!"
But as we were standing there, another little girl came running up to the yard monitor and said that "that girl" (the one who spit at Marika) called Marika "a little piglet". I'm not even sure that Marika heard it (I don't think she was there) and frankly, I'm really sick and tired of this trouble, so I just told the yard monitor, "oh, they're not getting along" and I thought that that would be the end of it.
However, the yard monitor was VERY upset by this and called the girl over. She asked her, "did you call Marika 'a little piglet'?" The girl said yes, and once again, started crying. When the yard monitor told her to apologize, she did - and then ran over to her mother crying. THEN the yard monitor told her (and kind of me) something to the effect of "they're not getting along and they're not using nice words". The girl's mother absolutely refused to look at me.
The yard monitor's summary perturbed me, because as far as I know, Marika has not provoked this girl in any way. I have grilled her on this repeatedly ("Did you say anything? Did you DO anything? When this girl talks to her mother, is she going to tell her you started something?" Marika always says no, without missing a beat). I keep telling Marika to stay away from her, but she is having difficulty doing so - either she thinks things will blow over (this is the 3rd incident in 6 days) or she doesn't know how to keep her distance without being rude.
*sigh* But today she told me that some little boy kept pushing her. I asked if she asked him to stop. She had. Did he stop? No. Did she tell him again? Yes. Did he stop? YES! The boy was trying to tell her something (Marika said he had already told her most of it, so I think she was getting a little impatient with him) and was just excited. She resolved the problem on her own and everything was fine.
Hopefully Marika will be able to distance herself from this person soon enough. However, just in case, I've started a log of incidents. I'm troubled, because this seems like such an early age for bullying behavior. Ordinarily I wouldn't be so concerned, but the frequency of these events is kind of alarming to me...
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