Brooke's Valentine's Day Party

My daughter is having a valentines day High School Musical sleepover party this Saturday. She is inviting a bunch (read: all) of her female classmates over on Saturday for pizza and...well, as little girls do...screaming.
Until last night, not every one of Brooke's female classmates was on the invite list. I found out that one of the girls in the class was not invited. Hmmmm.....Now I'm not a proponent of the "blanket invitation" method of inviting your entire class to each one of your birthday parties. I think that's ridiculous. But to have a girl party, and to invite ALL but ONE girl in the class....well, that's just gonna give someone a complex.
So I decided I needed to get to the bottom of this. So I sat down with Brooke to help her do her Valentine's cards and ask some leading questions.

"Why did you decide to not invite her to your party?"
"Because she's mean to me"

"What, does she say mean things to you?"
"Yeah. LOTS."

"Are you mean to her? Do you say things back?"
"No. I tell her to stop."

"Is she mean to the other kids in the class."
"Sort of, but mostly to me."

"Do the other kids join in, you know, back her up?"
"No. I like them, and they like me. It's just her."

Turns out that this little kid is quite a bitch to my darling girl. After further probing, I have found out that she has also kicked Brooke in the stomach on a couple of occasions. This simply will not do. After making sure that she understanded that she needs to involve a teacher when this happens, I talked to Brooke about how, although fighting is wrong, defending herself is completely necessary. At that point I remembered that Brooke is taking Tae Kwon Do. So I elaborated on what I meant by "defending yourself". I don't need to come home one day to find out Brooke has ripped out some kid's jugular. Move out of the way, use your low blocks, whatever. She'll probably take one shot, and then after she sees that you can handle yourself, she'll back down. If she doesn't, well, she was asking for whatever she gets.

After much consternation, she decided to invite her to the party. Brooke decided it would be the right thing to do. I told her I was proud of her. I also told her that if this girl gets out of hand at the party, she would be escorted home. That seemed to appease her.

Tannis promptly called the mom, and left an awkward message in Yoda-speak. When the mom called back, she confided in Tannis that she was surprised that her daughter didn't get invited to more parties. Go figure. Tannis told the mom what Brooke had said. So I guess we will see if things get better. Sure hope so. In any event, the kid is coming to the party, so I guess we'll see.