How could I have forgotten to mention . . .

Pretending!

Yowza. This has really taken off in the last month or so. I sort of thought he was pretending a little here and there back in November, but it was confirmed for me when we were visiting in Visalia. One afternoon Harper and Elijah and I went to a park to play. Elijah was just running around like a nuu-nuu, but Harper had an elaborate narrative going the whole time. At some point, she was a mama bird and she was building a nest for her babies. The nest was a pile of playground bark stacked neatly on a bench. Elijah observed for a minute and then he started gathering leaves for her. Okay. But then we started running around in the grass for quite a while, and I picked up a yellow ginko leaf and gave it to Elijah, and he held on to it for several minutes and when we got back over near the benches he went running up to a bench, the wrong one, and said, perturbed, "Nest?" We pointed out the other bench and he ran over and put a leaf on it for Harper-Bird. So, that's when I was sure.

Now that we're back home, he's been pretending up a storm. This morning he spent about an hour (an hour!) getting in and out of the cupboard in the kitchen along with his fire-truck. He told me the fire-truck lived there, and that they were in the fire-truck's backyard (he said this from inside the cupboard with the door shut). When I asked what he could see he told me there were: frogs, doggies, kitty-cats, airplanes, helicopters, beavers, and zebras.

Another thing he just started to do is to want to repeat scenarios (endlessly). So if I react in some amusing-to-him way to something he does, he wants us both to reenact the reaction and the events leading up to the reaction (over and over and over). And he's wanting me to pretend to be "other kids" (his terminology), which is sort of heartbraking! Sad little lonely sack.


He's also getting good at preparing and eating fake food. He makes a mean pretend applesauce and he makes a delightful little noise when he pretends to eat.

But he also uses these newfound powers for evil: the morning after the first night that I wouldn't nurse him throughout the night, I overheard him pretending that his toucan was asking for "ninnynilk" and he was telling it "No!" very firmly, kinda mean actually, and he hit it once. Okay, never did I tell him that whole night "No!" like that, and never did I hit him. I was horrified! But everyone insists he was just processing it, the new no-ninnynilk-nighttime thing, which I guess is right. He doesn't seem traumatized (just me).

Right now he is holding my watch and pretending that it is, in turn, a garbage truck, a backhoe loader, and an excavator.

And so it goes . . .

Also, in case I didn't mention this before. He calls Marty "Uncle Daddy."

Happy new year for reals now!