Heather, poor little Mika!!  This is a great question to address, and I'm interested to hear how others have/would handle it.  We have neighbors with a 2 year old little girl who we play with A LOT.  She is in full-time daycare and she definitely picks up bad habits from those kids.  She hits Payton, pushes her, steals toys out of her hand, yells at her, etc.  I would always tell her that Payton is smaller than her, a baby, and to be nice.  That doesn't really work.  Her mom sometimes catches what's going on and will ask her DD to stop, but she really doesn't do anything about it.  This little girl used to hit her mom in the head and face and the mom would let her.  I don't want Payton to learn to hit (and thankfully we haven't dealt with any biting issues yet).  But Heather, in this case, maybe just pick Mika up when this starts happening, and say to the little boy, "that's not nice."  Or something like that.  Maybe the moms will take note and finally do something about it.  I would be SO embarrassed if Payton was acting like that.  I'm sure it will come one day and you better believe I'll be right there on top of it, correcting it asap.  I just don't understand people who sit and do nothing.  No wonder our world is so screwed up.  Take responsibility.  These kids are young and impressionable.  It's time for US, the parents, to teach them and set examples early on about good manners and behaving.  Ugh. 

Well, I saw my friend with the bully and she apologized and said they shouldn't play together--I knew she felt worse about it probably than Mika or I did and Mika played with the other girl yesterday in her pool and they did great together.  She taught Mika how to blow bubbles with a bubble wand--she's 18 months, so just enough ahead of Mika to teach her good stuff.  So, I guess no worries about the bad one and the other one's fine in the end. As usual, just worried prematurely and unnecessarily!