With all the nice weather, we have been palling in the back yard more lately.  Claire has been into sports just a little bit lately, and we were practicing dribbling a basketball and hitting whiffle balls.

Molly got bored of this and went off to play with the pebbles and sand toys in the yard.  She ended up inventing a game which she dubbed “rock stand”.  In this game, you begin with a big crumbly rock (which I think was actually an old concrete ball).  You take another rock and whack the first rock into smaller pieces.  You then smash those little pieces into even smaller pieces and so on until there is only dust left.  There was a very important step in there that involved moving the small pieces between buckets using a certain shovel.

The game of rock stand is taken right from the pages of the Ramona Quimby books.  Ramona had a game called “brick factory” that involved smashing old bricks into smithereens.  She played brick factory with her friend Howie.  Molly basically is Ramona right now, although we don’t have a Howie.  Claire has stepped nicely into the role of Beezus, although Claire is generally even more patient and kind than Beezus, who was actually a pretty nice big sister too.

Molly says a lot of silly things.  She has a really active imagination, and share her thoughts throughout the day at random times.  Molly’s thoughts reveal a mind trying to understand a complicated world that just doesn’t make sense yet.  I usually do not record the numerous silly things she says, either because I just flat out do not understand what she is talking about, or more likely because I can’t take the time or record them in the moment, and they are soon forgotten.

But just this once, I remember one of her thoughts as I sit down hours later at night before I go to bed.  So here is a good example of the kind of things Molly says daily.  This is actually one of her more coherent moments.

While driving to the YMCA on this cold, cloudy day, Molly postulated on why we need firefighters in the winter time.  She said, “We need firefighters during winter because sometimes the snow is burning hot and some people leave their windows open.”  She went on to explain that the burning hot snow would light a house on fire if it lands inside.  I pressed her on this idea of “hot snow” a bit, and she conceded that maybe it is just warm snow.  Really warm snow.  Snow that is warm enough to burn down a house.  And except for the danger of burning snow, we would not need any firefighters during winter.

So there you go, a quick snapshot into Molly’s mental model of the world at age five and a half.