Watching her two big sisters climb onto the big, orange bus every morning has left young Chloe with a hole in her day.

She eagerly runs to the door yelling, “Shoes! Shoes! Shoes! Crocs!” Anything! Just get my shoes on so I can run outside and wave to my sisters getting on the bus. She waves, they barely remember the bear hugs they just doled out on the driveway that have to last Chloe (and Mommy) until 3pm before wedging themselves in to start negotiating lunch trades with their fellow passengers.

Chloe would chase that bus to the school if her little legs could make it further than ten steps before getting too far ahead of her and tumbling into the ditch or onto the asphalt leaving her needing a Band-Aid almost daily–one for her scraped knee, the other for a bruised heart.

Some days she comes back into the house and starts looking for the girls calling, “Heena! Heena! Eyee! Eyee! Eyee! Eyee!” which I find somewhat confusing given she just watched them drive away. She must assume they are running around to the front door of the house, sneaking in so they can play a breakfast time surprise on the naive youngster who is happy to fall for their pranks if it means being part of their playgroup.

Yesterday, I took Chloe to the park where I was pleasantly surprised to see a number of other same aged children, mostly boys, many of whom I suspect were also suffering from an older sibling back-to-school loss. Playmates? Could this really be happening?

I watched with great interest when two little boys approached Chloe attempting to fill a sand bucket to be poured through a sieve where she could then examine the remnants of some twigs and think she’d been panning for gold and struck it rich.

One little boy waddled over, he was her height, roughly her age and drinking from a similar sippy-cup. This exchange was going to pay off large in the BFF category. What a glorious day.

The boy bent down fairly close to Chloe’s face examining her inch by inch which prompted her to put her flat palm on his chest and say, “No.” Okay, I can live with that. He really didn’t have any sense of her personal space and I liked that she knew enough to claim some boundaries. I guess it could have been worse. She could have wrestled his sippy cup out of his hand or clocked him over the head with it.

The second boy approached the large sandbox area and Chloe quickly walked over to him. That’s right honey, friend number two has come to play, let’s embrace the olive branch and welcome him into your lair.

She froze in front of him in what I think I learned in yoga class is mountain pose, holding firm in her position and not letting the little guy get into the sandbox unless he made some fairly out of the way steps to one side. When he took a step closer, like a robot, she said, “Stop. It. Now.”

While I hated the fact she had made a mess of her first two real friendships, I was excited about her stringing three words together in some order that seemed to make sense.

Of course the other mothers didn’t see it that way and we are forever banned from yet another park.

That’s fine. We just have to kill time until 3pm.