imagination

Fairies!

| patmcg

Claire loves the fairies.

She has been building little houses for them, grinding up and refrigerating food for them, and even making a park and pond for them in the backyard.  She really believes in fairies.  Or she may have a rational clue they are not strictly speaking “real”, but that is a secondary concern because fairies are just so magical and sweet.

Claire checked out a “non fiction” book about fairies from the school library.  It tells all about the lives of “faeries”, as the book calls them, and Faeland, where they live.  It is all quite convincing and cute, and it is fun to pretend along with Claire (even though she knows that I know fairies aren’t exactly real.)

Polly Wogalina and friends

| patmcg

Claire’s imagination continues to run on high power. She spent most of last weekend in character as a five year old girl named Tara who lives in a hotel lobby. Tara loves to show guests around the hotel lobby (the downstairs of our house) as well as the hotel kitchen, laundry room, and bathroom. There is one guest room upstairs. Apparently it is a fairly exclusive hotel. Tara hangs out with a six year old boy named Sam (me). She spends a lot of time saying things like, “Hey, Sam! You wanna see the hotel dog?” A hotel chef (also me) serves delicious food from time to time, about which she always says, “My compliments to the chef!”, which she learned from her grandparents.

Over the last few days, Tara has morphed into Polly Wogalina, a two year old toddler who also lives in a hotel lobby. Polly is bigger and abler than her baby sister, Pig Tail Polly Wogalina (Molly), but big Polly is still just learning to walk, and talk she speaks like a baby, although she has full control of proper and sometimes quite complex grammar. I am a boy named French. Sometimes I call Claire “Polly Woggle”, but she does not like that. Kit is Sarah Cockaberra, a name which Claire is very proud to have invented.

We will see what next weekend holds, although Claire may be too distracted from Christmas presents to create any brand new characters.

Star Wars, the fairy tale

| patmcg

Claire has never seen Star Wars, not even a little bit of it. But she is quite curious about it because most of the boys in her class play Star Wars and talk about it a lot. Yes, over 30 years after the original movie came out, it is still the king of boys’ playtime.

Not having seen it, Claire is trying to piece together the world of Star Wars from little tidbits of information here and there. She doesn’t even know what most of the characters look like. For a while she would ask me basic questions. Is Star Wars real? Is Darth Vader a bad guy? What is Chewbacca exactly? All she knew about Chewbacca was that he was furry and could be described as a “waking carpet”. I had to pull up a picture of Yoda on the computer because Claire did not really understand my description of him. I told Claire that Yoda was green, about her own size, 1000 years old, wrinkly, and he talked kind of backwards. Seriously, what’s so confusing about that?
Tonight during bath time, Claire made up her own saga — fairy tale, actually — of Star Wars. I was Luke Skywalker, and she was my kid. She talked really weird, not English or anything, and so did I. Darth Vader was coming to get us. Claire had magic powers and could turn herself into any princess or fairy except Princess Leia. When Darth Vader got close, Claire turned herself into a fairy, and she offered to turn me into any fairy I wanted. I just said, “Okay, uh, thanks.” We both used our fairy powers to float up into the sky where Darth Vader could not get us. When we went into her bedroom after getting her dressed, she pointed down at the floor and said Darth Vader was down there. She stuck her finger on the floor and said, “Ouch! He bit my finger!” When I walked across the room to hug her, she said, “You’re stepping on Darth Vader!” I could not tell if she was happy or upset about that.
Then Kit came to read Claire her bedtime story, and I went shopping at Target. There, passing the toy department, I saw countless Star Wars toys lining aisles. I almost — but did not — buy something for Claire to help her straighten out her Star Wars story.