Emily has a bully

That's right, this sweet little girl has a bully. No joke.

I hate to refer to an almost 2 year old as a bully, but the definition, according to dictionary.com (a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people ), certainly fits.

As I've talked about before on here, we live on a great street for kids. It is a culdesac and has LOTS of kids. The kids often play in each others' driveways and at the end of the culdesac while the parents socialize. Unfortunately for Emily, though, the only other kid her age is a little boy a month older than her and for some reason, she is his target. Don't get me wrong, he goes after other kids occasionally, too, but they are all bigger than him, so it doesn't get him very far. One day last week, he was attempting to take a toy away from Kason. I saw this and knew M was going to get hurt when Kason walked away, so I went over to pull him off. Kicking and screaming, along with some attempted biting, ensued.

While I do realize some of this is normal toddler behavior, most of it is plain mean and unacceptable. If Emily touches a toy (doesn't matter who it belongs to), he immediately runs at her screaming, "NO!". She learned quickly what happens if she doesn't drop the toy. He snatches it from her hands and pushes her down. So, she now drops any toy she is touching if he is anywhere near, but does that stop him? Nope. He still walks right over to her and shoves her to the ground. It has gotten so bad that the other night, as soon as Emily saw them walk out of their house, she ran straight to Kyle and hugged on tight to his leg.

Today, they were almost playing nicely together, although there was a lot of refereeing by Kyle. By refereeing, I mean Kyle picking this little boy up off of Emily. She was playing with her push car and he ran over screaming to play. One of the biggest pluses about having our kids so close together is that they share very well for their ages. So, Emily was very nice. She let him in the car and pushed him around. After he got out, she got in and Kason pushed her around. But, when this little boy decided he was ready to ride again, he ran right over and attempted to sit on/push her out of the car. So, Kyle picked him up kicking and screaming. The little boy's dad went over to get him and brought him back where we were standing away from the situation. But, M went right back over. At this point, his dad brought him back and I tried to distract him by talking about the soccer ball on his jacket. He didn't quite get it, though, and thought there was a real soccer ball.

So, his mom went to grab a ball for him to play with. Emily saw the ball and got very excited wanting to play with M. She said, "Go get it, M". And, he did. And, do you know what he did with this ball that my daughter was so excited to play with? Threw it directly at her head. She got the hint and turned around to walk away. So, what did he do? Ran after her and full body tackled her in the middle of the street. I knew it was about to happen, but was holding Noah, and couldn't do much to stop it. I was so afraid that her whole face was going to be busted up and bleeding when she stood up, but she managed to escape with just some very minor scrapes on her cheeks and a lot of tears.

I have to tell you, I am livid and I really hate feeling this way. We like our neighbors, but we feel like they aren't doing anything to prevent this behavior. There is never any punishment or removal from the situation - they simply say, "No, M. Gentle touches." or exclaim that he is just acting out because he is tired. And, we are afraid that Emily is really going to end up hurt. It makes me so sad to see her so scared of another little kid.

Aside from not allowing him at our house and standing at her side every second M is outside, I'm not really sure what we can do. We don't want to tell our kids they can't go play with their friends just because he's outside, but we also don't want Emily to get hurt. So, what do we do about an almost 2 year old bully? What would you do?