Imaginary Friends

My children were playing together in the car today.   Some of the playing is friendly, some of it is definitely not.   My son is still working on collaborative play instead of his preferred, “let me boss you around” play.    His sister tolerates this for a while and then decides she doesn’t want to play anymore.

They do a combination of imaginative play using characters and ideas mixed together in interesting ways.  For example, my son waved around a pipe cleaner (acting as a magic wand) and used the spall “alohomora” from Harry Potter (the unlocking spell) and proclaimed the Paw Patrol stuffed animal  had become a zombie.  To a five- and six-year-old this all makes perfect sense.

I was just happy they weren’t kicking and swinging at each other as I drifted off in the front seat when I heard them talk about Gigi and Ghadi, Palmer and Chainer.   These four characters were their imaginary friends for some time but have been abandoned for older pursuits in the past few years.

The Big Boy Update:   My son had his hand in his pants this morning and said, “my penis doesn’t have any balls…oh, there’s one…oh, there’s the other.”   Mystery solved.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  If this is any indication of how little to none my daughter can see at this point, she asked me today, “I want to listen to Peppa Pig on the iPad”.   She puts her face down or curls into a ball and just listens to the iPad.   She doesn’t even try to look anymore.   What surprised me was she changed from ‘look’ to ‘listen’ in her request.