Amelia and her friend Zoe, also 5, were playing together yesterday and at one point I noticed they had matching palms. Both have deep nasty blisters right in the center of their palms from endless, obsessive monkey-bar and monkey-ring swinging. The picture above was, of course, staged. The hands that are also covered with ink are Amelia's.
I can't actually speak to whether Zoe is as obsessive about it as Amelia. Amelia's obsession with monkey bars and rings is way over-the-top. We're trying to counsel her to open her mind a bit to other forms of playground activity. Wherever we are, she just does the rings/bars over and over and over and over and over (fill in 500 more "and over's" here). She is determined and obsessed, and if it's a tricky curving one or something she hasn't tried before, she'll do it over and over until she's completed it in both directions each visit. This means there is often a lot of crying, wailing, flinging herself around on the ground, and hitting herself on the face. We tend to alternate between letting her work it out herself and telling her if she is so clearly miserable we're leaving the playground.
This might just be the first thing we've seen her be single-minded and completely obsessed to the point of pain about. She usually leaves the playground now with bloody palms...hence the stigmati. But her joy when she's flying through the air is impossible to miss.
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