Lily's Confronting The Bully

I've written on here a few times about Lily's struggle with a certain boy, R., at her kindergarten class. He would bug her, and eventually, the attacks became physical as well. She was very upset about the situation, while we assured her to be on her side and had a couple of meetings with her teachers about that.

We learned that this particular boy had similar issues Lily had when she first started kindergarten, not being able to communicate too well as he's from a family of immigrants as well. The only difference is that Lily was a 3-year old girl, and R. is a 5-year old boy with a much lower frustration threshold.

After a not-so-nice situation at dinner one evening, when Lily started bad-mouthing the boy, we sat her down to talk about taking other's into consideration, explaining to her why R. was behaving the way he is and that it's support and friendship he needs, not being cast out.

Last week, Lily told us during dinner about a situation in kindergarten: R. had spilled a good amount of juice from the container, and Lily was helping him cleaning the mess up. After that, they were friends, until R. announced during the class trip to the planetarium that now they couldn't be friends any more because she was a girl. Lily concluded - very matter-of-fact-ish - that he probably won't stay with this opinion for more than a couple of days.

I think that moment, my heart overflowed with love for that little girl who understands so much at such a young age, who has the kindest heart I can imagine, and who is so full of optimism that it leaves me amazed over and over again. I'm so proud of our girl!!