Games and Imagination

I love seeing Amelia's imagination and creativity continue to grow. One of the things she likes to do is make up games. All kinds of games. One example is with books. She will open her Penguin book, for example, and on pages where there is a sun she says it is hot and you get to turn the page again. If there is no sun, it is cold and it's the next player's turn. The person who gets to the end of the book wins.

She is also making up little stories with her toys more and more. It is fun to observe her when she doesn't know I am there.

She also likes to take a group of her stuffed animals and put them to sleep - each with their own pillow and blanket. My living room looked like a daycare center at naptime the other day. We moved her Pooh table into her room to better facilitate her tea parties. (It had been a craft center in the kitchen. We moved her plastic desk up from the basement and put it in the sunroom until winter.) Within minutes of moving her table she had extra chairs around, each occupied by a different animal, and was busy getting plates, bowls and silverware for each.

Rules and Walking

Amelia is really into rules, telling me if I break them (like if I brush my teeth without her ... "Mommy, you broke my first rule!") and making up new ones. I am tempted to use "rules" to help make her more compliant since they really seem to make her tick. However, I am afraid that would set her up for a lifetime of expecting everything in life to be black and white, and most of us have discovered there's a lot of gray out there. (And more and more in my hair each day, but that's another story.)

Last week I suggested we take a walk with Amelia putting one of her animals in her toy stroller and going down to Aidan's house and back. We've done that occasionally and it seemed like a good idea. She has wanted to walk every day since then - just once a day - but with a different animal each day. This morning I went on my jog/walk and was walking down the big hill when I heard something funny. I was trying to figure out if it was some sort of lawn equipment or handyman tool noise when I then heard a familiar voice say something that ended with "Amelia" and knew right away that a little girl had conned her daddy into a very early morning walk with the animal of the day! I wound up meeting up with them right at the turnaround point and we enjoyed the walk back together as a family with her pointing out her favorite mailboxes.

When we got home we made birthday cards for Abby who turned 3 today and Shirley, our neighbor. Amelia did a really nice job of drawing a kitty on the front and then writing all the words on the inside by herself. She then made one for her stuffed kitty Stripe who is also having a birthday, she says.

Yard Saling

We met Nana, Bethany, Billy & Hailey at the Wagon Wheel (along with Louise and Fifi) for breakfast and then stopped at a yard sale on the way home (that I had spotted on the way to breakfast). Kathy, whose sale it was, said stuff a bag for a $1. Can't beat that kind of bargain ... but I still tried (key word: tried) to be careful not to bring home anything we didn't really need.

Amelia was playing in the mountain of stuffed animals and I was helping her find ones that were cats. Once she found a few animals to play with, I browsed some of the other trash-to-treasures. I then heard "Mommy, can I buy these?" I figured, sure, for $1 it won't kill us to have a few extra stuffed animals. She'll play with them for a week or so, then ignore them for a month and we'll donate them or something. So I turn around and ask her what she has found. "A kitty, a dinosaur, a night-time Pooh Bear and Look! It's a person dressed like a monkey!!" she says. The person dressed as a monkey is actually a yellow teletubby named Lala. Hmmm, how do I talk her out of the teletubby? Well, it could not be done so we are the proud owners of a Lala, although I have not enlightened her as to its identity. When we got home, she put them each on a different step of the deck and than ran inside for more '"friends". (I also scored that adjustable basketball goal for $2 ... I was very pleased about that as I had been looking on Craigslist for one for a year now.)

She also told Daddy that her new toy was a person dressed like a monkey. She hadn't changed her description of it by the time we got home. It's funny to see their perception of things when they aren't told ahead of time what something is. At the yard sale, she also got some kind of Pokemon game that is like those lottery slot machines except it's horizontal and changes its eyes, nose and mouth so you get a completely different expression every time you press the button. So, I hear a sad voice coming from the back seat (and remember she doesn't know who Pokemon is either), "Look, Mommy, the bunny's ears are flat. She's scared!"

[picture dated 7/3/10]