Let's Be Friends

Yesterday we had our semi-annual parent-teacher conference at my son's daycare. It's always nice to get some perspective on your kids from folks who work with pre-schoolers on a daily basis. Our talk reinforced a lot of things we already knew, but emphasized some things we take for granted. "He's so outgoing and social!" the teacher exclaimed more than once.

It's true that our boy is a social butterfly. He loves to laugh and sing, and he loves to have fun with the other kids at school. When I come in for drop off or pick up times, I love to see him zipping around the room with the other little boys, playing with cars or dinosaurs or whatever catches their fancy that day. I stand, unobserved, and watch him, until one of the kids inevitably catches sight of me.

"Griffin, your mommy's here!"

Suddenly, I am surrounded by two and three year olds, holding things up for my inspection, yelling out strange and thought provoking comments that I'm sure make perfect sense to the other knee high peanuts in the room, but are unintelligible to me. As I do with my own child, I treat them all to smiles and "Wow"s. Then it's time to begin the process of saying goodbye.

The favorite goodbye in my memory went like this: Four little boys, standing in a solemn circle, high fiving each other and redistributing matchbox cars. When the high fives were complete, my son went back around the circle, giving each little boy a gigantic hug. It is one of the cutest things I've ever witnessed.

I love their friendships, because they are relatively easy and uncomplicated. They are too young for the refined social cruelty of pre-teen relationships. That comes later. Tonight, when I asked my son about a particular boy at school, his response was "He's my friend. He makes funny noises, and I laugh."

Sometimes, it's just that simple.