Just continuing to enjoy the bursting spontaneity that is 3 and 1/2…the enjoyment is good balance for the challenges of raising a strong-willed little person.
LP had an early affinity for giving things names. She used to spend hours making bouquets of grass or leaves and would give each one a name. AND then she would seemingly remember the names. This has evolved twofold…into both a delightful practice of naming stuffed animals and objects that come into her life and in creating new words.
On the object front, she has a collection of strawberry baskets with yarn tied to them that have become her puppies. (This all started as a craft project that I thought would be fun that LP wanted no part of because why would you create yarn webs inside a puppy?) They are Sadie, Puppinaise, Puppinaise’s Cousin and As You Drift Away. She also is into nicknames as her beloved wild thing named, Violin Case, is now also known as “The Mad Baby.” (Lots of work in our home on using words for emotions…glad to know it is making an impression.)
And one of my favorite things to do when we come across a new object is to ask her what it is called. I need to start keeping pen and paper at hand both for posterity and because she gets quite put out when I don’t remember them (I always was slow at learning other languages).
A new twist is the addition of made-up verbs…the most recent is “sninging.” Sninging is when you start to sneeze and end up singing. (Once you know about, it starts to happen all the time.) We had quite a good time sninging at dinner the other night and ImprovDad is a champion sninger.
At the library I was happy to stumble on a book that is delighting LP in this area of creating new words. We were already fans of Jack Prelutsky and I think Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant is some of his best work. 17 short poems about what you get when you cross an animal (like an elephant) with an object (like an umbrella). The illustrations by Carin Berger are wonderfully wild and some of the combos are brilliant. My favorite is the Clocktopus while LP is most fond of the Pop-up Toadsters.
LP has internalized the idea of making a new creation out of two known things. Last night, while enjoying a red popsicle, she proclaimed she was eating a “lobsicle” – half lobster, half popsicle.
