I hear “Oona’s commmming!!! …†and then a stream of tag playing kids pours off of the playground equipment. Picking up O+F from school is way better than being at work.
It’s a little alarming that at any given moment there’s at least one pair of boys trying to pin each other to the ground. It’s harmless, at least by traditional “boys will be boys†standards, but it’s not too hard to see the progression of those ideas as a boy gets older. I wrestled and battled with boys when I was in elementary school, and I think what was most harmful was less what I learned from those moments of aggression and more what I didn’t learn – collaboration, yielding sometimes, listening, collective survival instead of individual survival.