Sleepover Angst

Nothing really heavy in this post, but just me thinking out loud about the myriad ways in which three pre-to-barely-adolescent girls can gang up on each other. And on the youngest sibling of two of them.

Last night, we had a sleepover  - Leanna(11 next week), Abby(8.5), and Kiki(just ten). Kiki is a very nice little girl, as I have mentioned on this blog before, but I'm starting to notice a pattern... every time more than one child spends the night (I'm counting Leanna here, as she is only here overnight every couple of weeks), somebody has hurt feelings in the morning. More often than not this person is Lizzy; she's not yet four and the big girls (more or less reasonably) exclude her from a lot of their games. But the last three times, it's been Abby.

Now Abby is the sensitive one - she's not as defensive or easily offended as Leanna, but she's easily hurt.  Every little thing is a calamity in her world. This morning apparently she asked Kiki where her DS stylus was, as Kiki had been the last to use it. Kiki took this as an accusation and went on the defensive. Abby flounced out to get an ice cube, whereupon the other two girls accused her of "being selfish and not helping clean up". She started to cry and hid in the closet, whereupon the other two got snarky ("gosh, do you hear someone crying? Must be Lizzy, because big girls don't cry...") During all this, all three girls are shooing Lizzy out of the room because Lizzy is really less than no help in cleaning the room.

I don't know if it's sleep deprivation or pre-adolescent hormones or what, but this sort of thing has happened before during sleepovers. And often Abby's behavior tone toward Lizzy is superior and controlling after older children have been over, which may be related. I'm sure it's all normal. Just frustrating.