Home Sweet Los Angeles

Yesterday afternoon, five second grade girls came over to our house. I had invited all six of the girls in Evie's class to come over a few weeks ago, days after her comment about feeling unnoticed at recess, but hadn’t actually expected such an enthusiastic response. I was initially excited that she would have an opportunity to get to know her classmates better, but as the day approached, I began to feel a little nervous about having them all here. I wasn’t concerned with the chaos - in Frederick, we had parties with seventy-five people where the children outnumbered the adults. As the scribbles on our walls and stains on the couches clearly show, chaos has long been the norm in our family. But after hearing about Evie‘s shyness around her classmates at recess, I began to imagine them all as something out of a bad Hannah Montana episode. I envisioned them sitting around the table, sighing with boredom, and excluding Evie from their pre-teen conversation.

Fortunately, my vision was shattered even by the time we walked the two blocks home. The girls held hands with each other, easily dividing into partners with no hurt feelings, and spent the way home talking about how excited they were for a play date. I could tell this was a group of sweet, fun and basically typical girls. Of course I shouldn’t say “typical” , as they are obviously all unique - there is funny and somewhat bossy Jessica, quiet and thoughtful Julia, energetic Charlotte (who demonstrated a full split and numerous back walk-overs in our living room), chatty and cheerful Joy and studious and shy Nicolette - but they fell into the role of typical seven-year-old play with ease. They sat at the table, eating snacks and singing to Camp Rock. They dove right into imaginative play, with Jessica turning into the queen of the tree house and the other girls dividing into messengers and servants and pets for the queen. They built crowns out of pipe cleaners and showed each other songs they knew on the piano. And all the while, Evie was completely part of the group, hugging and giggling and playing.

When the girls’ parents came to pick them up, each one mentioned getting together again in the future. This afternoon, when I picked Evie up from school, she told me that the best part of the day was recess. The girls in her class started a "hopscotch club" and were planning on meeting to play hopscotch every day from now on.

We are still adjusting to life in a new city. We will always miss our friends and family and we have a ways to go still in creating a complete community for ourselves here, but with the recess issue resolved, I feel like all three of the girls are happy and that is a huge start to making Los Angeles feel like home.