As an addendum to the Playing Pretend post, Evie lately has forced Sara into playing the “bad guys” from Pinocchio (both of them). This means that she insists that every thing that Sara says, should be mean. If Sara is not growling commands at her, Evie gets upset. If Sara is growling commands at her angrily, she quietly does whatever Sara wants.
It’s starting to get really creepy.
Evie loves to play pretend. So much so, that the line between reality and pretend starts to blur a little bit.
At any given moment, Evie has assigned all of us characters to play. And I mean all of us, not just Sara, Evie, and me, but also Nala, stuffed animals, even inanimate objects (er, other inanimate objects besides the stuffed animals) in some cases.
It began with Alice in Wonderland. When she was going through her Alice phase, specifically after seeing the play, she assigned each of us a character. She was the White Rabbit, Sara was Alice, and I was (unfortunately) the Queen of Hearts. Not only did we have to answer to and address each other by these names, when called upon, we each had a catch phrase to say. Evie’s was, “I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date! No time to say hello, goodbye, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!” Sara’s was, “Curiouser and curiouser,” and mine was, “Off to the dungeon!” (In the play, they were hesitant to say, “Off with her head!” so the queen was reduced to “off to the dungeon!”
As I commented on a similar post over at Stay at Home Blogger:
It leads to such ridiculous statements by Evie as, “Alice and the White Rabbit are watching the Queen of Hearts put salsa on his burrito.”
It kind of takes you out of the moment when you are trying to be stern with her and she says, “No, I’m not Evie, I’m Smevelyn!” (My fault on that one, it was a name I used for a little girl in a story I told her…not very creative)
The problem is, that our identities change by the minute. I could be Geppetto from Pinocchio, The Man with the Yellow Hat from Curious George, or Mufasa from the Lion King, all within a span of an hour. In fact, even Evie has trouble keeping track of who is supposed to be who. The other day I overheard her having a conversation with herself that went:
“Evie, do you have a bumblebee?
No, I’m not Evie, I’m George.
Oh, excuse me!”
Although it gets old at times, quite frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I think an imagination extremely underrated as an important life skill. I think being able to think in that way will help you be successful, no matter what you end up doing in life. And I love that she will be able to entertain herself in this way. So in the meantime, I’ll put up with answering to Geppetto and telling her 50 times in a row that I’m glad she saved me from that whale.
I’m just telling you this, so that you can expect to have a new name assigned to you, should you ever come over to visit.
For those B-52 fans out there…
(excuse the poor editing: quick and dirty at midnight!)
So, let me explain about that one. I was hiding under a blanket and she found me. I said, “No, no, this isn’t Daddy! I’m just a rock!” So the next time she found me she said, “Oh, I just found a rock.” Logically, I responded, “But it wasn’t a rock…it was a Rock Lobst-ah!” Now, anytime someone is hiding under a blanket, they are “being a rock lobster”.
She also has another version, in which someone goes under a dock and there they find a rock, however, it’s just “a plain old rock”, and not, in fact, a rock lobster.
Rock Lobster! Come on, it’s not as bad as the time she asked her Grandpa, “Have you heard about the bird? Everybody’s heard about the bird!”
Let me start by saying that Evie is an amazingly good kid. She very, very rarely does anything to really get in trouble. Furthermore, let me say that we sort of brought about this situation by planning a day that was a little rough for her. She missed meal times and she missed nap time. So, by the time we finally did get her down for a nap, she was sort of past the point of no return.
So, more or less, the library book incident involved her ripping the crap out of the book, when she was supposed to be taking a nap. I mean, utterly destroying, every single page removed. It was sort of spectacular in it’s destruction.
Now, since she doesn’t usually do things like this, Sara and I were sort of at a loss for what to do. We told her how naughty it was and gave her a time-out, but she just didn’t seem to really get it. She told me later, the reason she ripped up that book was because it wasn’t hers. She knew on some surface level that she was wrong, but there wasn’t really any indication that she wouldn’t just do it again, if given the chance.
I felt like it was important that she be the one to tell the librarian that she ripped up the book. This technique probably works pretty well for a little older kids, but she’s a little too young to be cowed by such a thing. I still think it was the right thing to do though. The library was open for another 45 minutes or so, so we hopped in the car so we could take care of it while it was still fresh in her mind.
I felt pretty bad when, on the way to the library, she was saying to herself, “You have to apologize. You always apologize before you go to the police.” Ouch! I explained to her that we were not going to the police, just the library, but I kind of thought, “Maybe we’re overdoing it a little bit.” It only got worse.
She never did manage a nap, so as soon as we got in the car, she was out. When we got to the library she was in that state that kids get into sometimes where they are so tired that nothing else matters in the world. She tried walking with her eyes closed. She grabbed on to the legs of people she didn’t know, clinging to them for support. She couldn’t support her own weight, slumping to the floor when I wasn’t physically holding her up. So here we are waiting in line so that she can apologize to the librarian, and I’m trying everything to wake her up. I felt like everyone was judging me, thinking, “Geez, no wonder this kid did this, her parents are clearly not letting her nap, etc.” In short, I felt like a child abuser. She did apologize (and wake up) at some point. We also returned all the other library books and didn’t get any more.
I feel like we handled it pretty well. Anybody else have similar experiences? Horror stories? Support, sympathy, ridicule? Share in the comments.
Over the weekend we took Evie to a women’s college basketball game. It was actually a lot of fun. Evie was excited to learn about a new sport and see people playing actually playing it. More exciting though were the peripheral things, like the jazz band and the decorations for the Hawaiian theme promotion. Most exciting of all, of course, was the mascot.
Evie gave him several high-fives over the course of the evening, and she demanded to know where he was at all time. We spent much of the game looking around for him so she could check out what he was up to. We’re pretty sure he was a Phoenix, but Evie insisted he was a Cardinal, due to the fact that he was red. Every dance move, every attempt to pep up the crowd, was amazing to her. And for my own part, I really enjoyed the game. It was exciting.
Unfortunately we left before the end, so I didn’t see who won. Evie has asked many times since then if we could go back to “see the bird” and has made plans for our next trip. So who knows, we might be back to watch another game.
Evie, laughing: “Those aren’t pants!”
Me: “Yes they are.”
Evie: “No they’re not!”
Sara: “What are they, if they aren’t pants?”
Evie: “Cactuses!”
They were khaki’s, although maybe she wasn’t misunderstanding the word…she finds khaki’s to be stiff and poky.
Over break she was taking a nap in the car, when suddenly she sat bolt upright and announced, “I have to go potty!” We started looking around and finally found a place to pull over and go. As we were looking, she says, “I was having a dream I was going potty.” So we had to explain to her, “It’s okay, that happens to adults too!” I don’t know how many times I have had dreams like that.
The next day she was eating and she started crying. She said, “I ate my finger! Does that happen to adults too?”
It’s so funny, seeing her have these dreams that adults have. This morning she told me a dream that she was in a place where there were lots of people eating, and she was looking and looking for her chair, but she couldn’t find it. Again, haven’t we all had dreams like that? She hasn’t gone to school yet, so she can’t have ones where she hasn’t studied for a test, or can’t find a class or her locker. I still have a dream like that now and again.
Of course, she has strictly Evie dreams too, like the one she had over the weekend where her feet got dirty because she had cheese in her Elmo slippers…
Shane Halbach 