Imaginary Friend

I have to start blogging more frequently. Things keep piling up in my brain to blog about, and in my advanced age I can only keep track of so many before I forget them. But this one's easy to get down, because Siena adds to this topic just about every day.

The kid can't catch a ball yet, and her attention span rules out most board games. --DIGRESSION ALERT!-- Except Candy Land. Which is just a bullshit game, let me tell you. Players move based on the cards that they draw from a single deck, so if my card has, say, two yellow squares on it, then I move to the second yellow square down the path. This means that the outcome of every game is predetermined once the deck is shuffled and the order of play is established. You could deal the deck to the players, let them figure out in how many moves they make it to the finish, and declare the one with the fewest steps the winner. This would be just about as much fun as actually "playing" the "game." There's a reason why you haven't played CL since you were three. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

But one area of juvenile recreation in which Siena excels is "dramatic play." Anything involving role-playing or imaginary activities, from cooking ravioli to saving the world as the littlest superhero, is her forte. Maybe this isn't surprising: her parents met at auditions for Taming of the Shrew (Mommy was the shrew, BTW) and have maintained, shall we say, a certain interest in show business. But no one told the kid that she had to run around the house after her bath with her hoodie-towel on her head and tell us she was SuperGirl. She even has her own fanfare, "Da-Da-Daaa!" The best is when she assembles the rest of her rump Justice League: SuperDaddy (whom some of you know has a long and proud history of running around with a towel-cape) and SuperBaby, who by day is Emma, one of Siena's few babies to actually have a name. We'd love for you to see how cute it is, but transmission via Internet of any photos of Siena's post-bath shenanigans would likely land Daddy in jail, such are the times in which we live.

SuperGirl is hardly Siena's only role. In fact, this all started maybe a year ago when someone got her a Cinderella kit with a tiara, glass slippers, and a magic wand. For hours Siena and I would use the magic wand to turn each other into animals, chiefly sharks and tigers, then back into our normal selves. Nowadays she finds it more convenient to transmogrify ourselves with a wave of her finger, but we have broadened our repertoire to include snakes, horses, and... dragons!

Yes, the kid loves dragons. I still can't figure out where that comes from. But she knows what they look like, how to flap her arms/wings to match a dragon's, and how to make that raspy sound from the back of your throat that represents fire-breathing. Sometimes we'll both morph into dragons and terrorize Mommy, though she doesn't exactly sell the fear. Of course, sometimes I'll be the dragon and she'll be the knight, delivering fatal wounds with an extended index finger as she shouts "Sowrd! Sword! Sword!" Siena's so into the dragon motif that at preschool last week, when the theme was superheroes, Siena's made-up superhero identity was Super Dragon. Oh well, at least it isn't unicorns.

The other funy side of Siena's "dramatic play" has shown up since Daddy's been more of a Mr. Mom as Mommy starts her new job. Siena will want to take her babies to the play park for pretend, and when she does Daddy has to pretend that he's one of the babies! Seems odd to me, but it is fun to throw back at Siena a little bit of the nagging that I get from her on a regular basis, and she knows what I'm doing. And she's a good pretend mther, always making sure to pretend to buckle me into my pretend car seat before we drive to New York or Louisiana or The Beach. She'll even rub my back before pretend-naptime, always a nice gesture.

Some day, Siena will abandon all this, and move on to ponies or whatever it is that girls are interested in. Then I'll only have fond memories of towels tucked into shirts and magic wands. Of course, if she never grows out of this, then she can write screenplays with Daddy.