Fries with That?

Today Marty was digging around in our bucket of plastic food, trying to find an egg to put in his chocolate stew. I guess he got tired of looking, because suddenly he said “Pizza! You always need pizza for the chocolate stew.” A few minutes later he told me that he needed to mix it with the loud mixer so I should go play somewhere else.

When we lived in Kentucky, a little girl in the neighborhood would come over to play restaurant, and drive 3-year-old Aislinn completely crazy. Aislinn would sit at her little table and order chicken and french fries, just as she had in every restaurant she’d ever visited, and the other girl (who was about 8) would say she didn’t have any french fries because we didn’t have any plastic french fries. She would only serve the food that we had a plastic representative for, nothing imaginary. I would always suggest that she pretend that the carrots were french fries, but she never went for that suggestion. Finally, I suggested that they stop playing restaurant before Aislinn was driven to drink the Bud Light she was always ordering (we had unlabelled silver cans that the 8-year old allowed to be beer).

My kiddies may be at the odd end of the spectrum, but every once in a while it’s nice to see that their imaginations are still intact.