True Love and Sandcastles

Owen has competition.

You may remember that Owen is Maggie’s true love. Maggie actually has several true loves, because there’s also a guy at the college, Andy, who has approached us about an arranged marriage to Maggie. (Another guy, Jake, asked for Mia but since she’s determined to just love Jesus and have no children we’ve broken Jake’s heart and asked him to look elsewhere).

Apparently Maggie’s infectious smile and boundless energy are unreasonably attractive to the boys.


We went to the library for story hour this morning. It was an all girls crew, me, Gaby, Mia, Maggie, Mikayla and our little friend Rachel. We occupied two rows, spread out. Maggie was on the end.

On the next row down was a little boy named Rieker (or something like that) with grandma. He caught a glance of Maggie and that was it. He was smitten.

For the rest of the story time Rieker tried to sit next to Maggie and make a move. He would sidle up to her and look at her.

She would look away and scoot closer to Rachel. She came and sat next to me on another step. Rieker sat on the step next to her.

Maggie moved to sit in between Gaby and me. Reiker got as close to me as possible and look wistfully at Maggie while the librarian read about a dinosaur wearing a flowered hat.

Mia came and asked Maggie if she’d like to sit in between her and Rachel. Maggie said yes and moved. Rieker moved with her.

Fortunately the reading time came to an end before Maggie could punch him in the nose. I think she’s only got eyes for Owen and loyalty is hardwired into her brain.

Or something like that.

However, as a pair the girls are not quite so magnetic.

I say this with authority because a few days ago we took the girls to Sonic for a cold beverage and time to play in their sandy play area. (We won’t be doing that too often – sand is the pits to clean up! It has joined the banned items in our house. Since I ban so many things it has plenty of company outside the four walls of our home!)

There was another pair of siblings, a girl and boy about 7 and 10 years old, playing in the sand. I saw Mia kick sand by them once and asked her to stop. Since they’ve never really played in sand before she hasn’t learned things like “don’t kick sand because it will get on other people.” Common courtesy – we’ll work on it as the situations rise.

I also have neglected to teach her something else - patience.

Because when the siblings got up to leave Mia went to their sandcastle, played with it for 30 seconds and then knocked it to the ground.

This upset the siblings who were busy putting their shoes on and they came back across the sand pit to confront her. It was pretty surprising to me – they were both significantly larger than she is and they were right in her face, angry, asking why she knocked down their castle.

She was not intimidated or cowed in any way. She spread her hands out and just looked at them like, “what is your problem?” So they knocked her sandcastle down.

Then they saw me watching with interest and ran back to their dad, loaded into their car and headed out.

Isaiah and I were in hot discussion over why significantly older kids thought it was ok to take on a four-year-old but let it be for awhile. When Mia came back to our table from playing I asked her if she had anything to tell us.

“No,” Mia said. Then she hesitated and said, “oh... There’s just one thing I want to tell you about.”

“Oh really? What’s that?”

“Those big kids,” Mia said. “Well... We messed their castle up so they messed our castle up and so’s then our hearts were broken and we’re building another one.”

Then she went off to play with her sand castle and broken heart.

Don’t you wish conflicts always ended that easily??

Update: I sent the last update to Andy since I had used his name. He gave me permission to share his response with you:

“FYI, we aren’t "talking" about an arranged marriage. Its a done deal. I helped Isaiah take some photos of the library yesterday. That’s the equivalent of a dowry in 90% of the worlds cultures.”

When people ask me why on earth we would spend so much of our time with college students, this is a reason. They’re funny. :)

JJ