Playground Etiquette

We are finally all feeling better, after a bout with the stomach virus for all of us last week.  I survived my first puke-in-the-middle-of-the-night episode and even managed to bathe Addison and change the crib sheets without waking Mackenzie.  Luckily, it was a relatively short-lived virus this time.

The weather was beautiful this weekend, and we spent most of Saturday outside.  I was supposed to walk a 5K with friends, but after being sick on Friday I was afraid I didn't have the strength to make it through the whole thing.  I needed to pick out birthday invitations for the girls, so Addison and I took a shopping trip while Mackenzie helped her daddy clean out his workshop.  It was nice for each of us to get some individual time with our girls, and Addison was a great shopping buddy!  We spent the afternoon riding cars, blowing bubbles, playing in the sandbox, swinging, and enjoying the sunshine.


Yesterday, after our Sunday afternoon naps, we decided to go to the park.  The one closest to our house has a nice playground, but it is usually pretty crowded on sunny weekend afternoons.  Jeremy and I favor one in town, where there is almost never anyone else playing.  It is nice having all the swings to ourselves!  I thought the girls could benefit from a little peer interaction, though, so we decided to go to the big one close to the house.

Now, I try very hard not to be a nervous, overprotective mother who is always hovering in the background to prevent my babies from getting into trouble, but at the playground, it's a different story.  A & M are fairly small for their age and can't manage the playground equipment very well.  Eventually, I am sure I will be one of those moms sitting in the shade, watching my girls play happily.  But right now, Jeremy and I hover nearby, making sure they don't step off the platform or fall off the stairs to the slide.

That's where my question comes in...when do you intervene if another child is being rude to your child?  I try to make A & M move on if there are other children waiting for the slide or the see saw, which doesn't happen often.  But sometimes kids want to play around them and get a little rough for my taste.  For instance, there was a little boy playing on the slide and jungle gym at the same time as the girls.  He was maybe four, but was easily three times their size.  I was moving Mackenzie from looking up the front of the tunnel slide and I asked the boy to wait before he slid so he wouldn't kick her.  The boy replied something to the effect of "I'll slide when I want to" and came barreling down the slide, just as I yanked M out of the way.  She narrowly missed being kicked in the face by the kid's cowboy boots (who the heck lets their kid wear cowboy boots to the park, anyway?).

We moved on to play with something else to escape the little punk (sorry, but that's how I felt about him!), but it really made me wonder about playground etiquette.  What are the accepted social behaviors there?  Was I okay in asking him to please not climb over my children to get to the slide?  Should we just stick to the empty park from now on?  What are your rules??