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Sometime in the months following Madeline’s third birthday, she made it to a developmental step that really made her seem like a real preschooler — pretending became her favorite way to play. Young children begin the pretending journey when they are barely able to talk. I remember Madeline getting a toy phone for her first birthday, and she knew exactly what to do with it.

But there is something special about preschool-age pretending. It moves from a simple, “I’m pretending to make you some eggs.” to “Let’s play dinner. I’m the dad and I’m going to work. You’re the mom and you are going to stay home and cook dinner. When I get home, we’ll sit at the table and eat. Okay?”

The kids and I generally spend at least an hour a day engaging in pretend play, acting out various scenarios together. Sometimes, it feels like the three of us spend all day doing this (or at least all day when it’s not meal time, computer time, or TV time). Well, it’s really just me and Madeline doing the pretending — Erik is occasionally assigned a part in the drama by Madeline which I have to help him act out, and other times he just plays with his toys, while we chatter away.

Sometimes the scenes we act out are the typical preschooler fare of playing house (well, mostly the cooking and eating meals part of playing house), playing with baby dolls (Madeline is almost always the mommy to the baby dolls, of course), playing doctor to both people and animals, and playing with blocks to build castles inhabited by small plastic figurines that stand in as a king, prince, princess, and so forth (Yesterday, the Barney with the raincoat was the king, Bert was a prince, and a Pooh in a bunny costume came to visit. But Madeline decided there was no room in the castle tower, so the Pooh figurine couldn’t stay for dinner. Later, after a castle expansion, Elmo came calling and was allowed to stay for a meal.)

Madeline also thinks of many other creative ways to pretend. We’ve been playing “beach” the last couple of days. This involves “packing up” — one of her favorite pretending devices. We find some kind of appropriate bag, and go around the house finding real or pretend items to fill it. The beach bag contained real swimsuits and a beach towel, an empty plastic bottle to stand in for sunscreen, a play cell phone, pretend keys, and Madeline’s sunglasses. At first the play was pretty typical — we pretended to drive to the beach, we pretended to put on swimsuits (Madeline really put hers on), we “swam” around the living room, and we made “sand castles” out of various types of blocks.

Then Madeline decided we were going to play “crab” at the beach. “One person does a crab walk, over there in the water,” she told me, “then you try to come and swim in the water, but the crab is in the way, and the crab comes and grabs you.” We took turns playing a few basic variations on this for a while. Then Madeline decided the crabs were having a marching band in the water. Then the crabs got on a plane and went far away on vacation (this turned into hide-and-seek and I had to go “find the crab” in her faraway vacation spot aka the corner of the kitchen).

Besides playing beach, Madeline has also enjoyed playing “bear cave” (our play tent is the cave), “slumber party”, “going to grandma’s house”, and “glass slipper ball” just to name a few of her many scenarios.

I know that just pretending for the sake of pretending is an important part of development, but I’m also trying to make the most of the time. I try and challenge Madeline to think creatively by asking her challenging questions or taking the scenario in a direction she might not expect. Lessons on character or manners or social skills can easily become part of almost any pretending situation. And of course I fit in opportunities to talk about the usual preschool stuff like letters, numbers, colors, shapes, etc.

I don’t always enjoy the pretending. Sometimes it is down right exhausting. I occasionally wonder if Madeline enjoys it so much because it puts her in the drivers seat. I also wonder how beneficial it would be if she could have more opportunities to pretend with kids her own age or a little older. Whatever the case, I’m sure we will be doing much more pretending in the days to come.

I just couldn’t resist using that pun.  We got a new vehicle today.  It’s a 1995 Honda Odyssey, and it is mostly a minivan.   I say “mostly” because it has four doors that all swing open like regular car doors and it’s not quite as big as a regular minivan.  I want to call it a mini-minivan, and Tony has been calling it a ‘tweener.   It’s definitely an incremental step between a station wagon and a normal minivan.

The picture below doesn’t really do the color very much justice.  It was hard to get a good shot in the late afternoon, cloudy light:

We still have the Volvo.   However after nearly two months without a working vehicle of our own and no end in sight to the Volvo’s woes, we decided we really needed a reliable vehicle.  We feel very fortunate at having found a steal of a deal on the Odyssey — it was the first vehicle Tony looked at it.  He liked it so much (and it was such an amazing deal we didn’t want to let get away) that I didn’t even see it before we bought it — we just talked it over on the phone!

Tony will continue to replace parts on the Volvo to find whatever is causing it’s abnormal behavior (10 parts have been replaced so far with little improvement).  Our plan is to get the Volvo in shape to sell…and then either sell it…or keep it and sell the Odyssey if it turns out we don’t like it as much as our beloved station wagon after a couple months.   Tony is pondering putting them both up for sale when the Volvo is ready and then just keeping which ever doesn’t sell first.  Or maybe we’ll sell both and fund Tony’s dream of having a vehicle that runs on biodiesel or electric power. 

Our camera suddenly stopped working two days before Christmas, so in order to have a camera to take pictures of our kids opening gifts on Christmas morning, we made a quick craisglist purchase on Christmas eve. I really wanted a camera that could take videos, and the camera we purchased has that capability. I was surprised to find out that the new camera does not record sound with the videos. So, I have three videos to post today, but none of them have the sound of what was going on at the time. We added music to two of them, which should make them a little more enjoyable to watch.

Erik Learns to Crawl!

Erik turned 10 months old on Friday, and he celebrated by crawling. He had made a few good attempts in the days leading up to Friday, but he had his first repeated successes on that day. He is crawling more and more each day and learning to explore. In the last few days he has also perfected the art of pulling himself up to standing, and has made a few attempts to “cruise” (take steps while holding on to furniture). At the rate he is moving through these motion milestones, maybe we can expect him to be walking before his birthday rolls around!

Ice Skating at the Park

Madeline is learning to ice skate, and we took a family ice skating trip to nearby Powderhorn Park on Sunday afternoon. I ice skated too, but I had the camera the whole time, so my skating does not appear in the video, unfortunately. Erik got to ride along in the stroller!

Just for fun: Madeline dancing

This is a common sight at our house — Madeline dressing up in her “princess clothes” or “fancy gowns” and putting on dance shows. She was singing too — this video really would have been a lot better with sound!

(For anyone who cares, Tony put together the Ice Skating video using a trial version of some video editing software. I made the crawling video using the video editing tools on eyespot.com. I tried to do it on the youtube remixer so that all our videos could be there, but I couldn’t get it to work for me. If you have just a little bit of video editing you want to do, eyespot is a good bet — it is pretty easy to use!)

Here’s a round up of a few of the funny, memorable things Madeline has said to us lately..

“Mommy, are you old?”

“Come here and see this Daddy…It’s increb-a-ble!” (Said when she saw me packing into a box a bunch of clothes that no longer fit her.)

(Said after she comes into the living room carrying a baby doll): “Look, I have baby Jesus. He was born in a manger. But now I am going to take him to the hospital so he can see a doctor. He’s sick.”

Madeline: “What will Erik be when he grows up? A grown-up?”
Me: “Yes, and he will be a man, and maybe a Daddy.”
Madeline: “A man? Wow, that’s a funny joke!”

“A new baby was born at the hospital today…A baby duckie!”

“All my candy is almost gone. But when it’s gone, I’ll just go trick-or-treating again and get more!”

(Said as we are making cookies): “I don’t think I like chocolate chips. They’re too spicy. No, I’m not being silly”
(Then, five minutes later): “mmm, these are good chocolate chip cookies.”

(Said after hearing a note of frustration in my voice): “Mommy, are you sad? mad? bad? tired? fustated?”

Madeline: “My real birthday is in May. But my pretend birthday is in March”
Me: “But I thought you said that your pretend birthday party was going to be today? It’s January right now. ”
Madeline: “I’m just pretending it’s March too”

“I want to pray before lunch! …Dear Man, thank you for this food.  Thank you for God.  Amen.”

If you have preschool age children, the title of this entry might bring to mind a song about another food.  We’ve been listening to that song a lot around here lately!

Moving right along…I’ve been trying several new recipes this month.  I’m most proud of the Curry meal I made this past weekend:

I would say it’s basically an Indian meal, though I am sure they are not eating too much curried Beef in India! The dishes are (clockwise, beginning at the top):  “Bombay” curry (Not sure how it got that name — it’s basically curried beef with a sauce that contains coconut milk, making it a little bit sweet), Curried Zucchini, White rice, and Naan (an Indian flat bread — though this batch was not particularly flat). I was very happy with the meal overall — it was not really spicy at all, much to Tony’s disappointment and Madeline’s delight.  Hopefully I can find some middle ground on the heat level next time!

This month I’ve also tried new recipes for Thai Chicken Pizza, Cheese stuffed meatballs, Pork Chop and Apple Skillet, Shepherd’s Pie, and a pasta dish with spinach and tomatoes. So far they have all been generally successful, though I managed to get too much peanut butter in the Thai pizza…and though the pizza wasn’t spicy at all, Madeline really had a hard time eating it — most likely because it had the word “Thai” in the name, and her least favorite meal I make is Pad Thai (after we tried to get her to eat it when it was a little on the spicy side).   I don’t have anything new and exciting on the menu for the rest of this week, but my success with new recipes so far this month is definitely keeping me motivating to look for more new and tasty recipes!

A recent trip to the winter clearance section at Old Navy netted us the following:

That’s 11 items we purchased for a total of about $26! Five shirts are for Erik to wear later this winter (since he has almost outgrown his current crop of long-sleeve shirts), and the other six items are for Madeline.  It’s too bad we used up the kids’ patience looking for clothes for them — it would have been fun to find some bargain clothes for us, too!