Playing Pretend

Sophia is starting to really get into creative play and imagination. Earlier in her life, she would go through the motions of, say, cooking with her toy pans or having a phone conversation, but now she is really pretending that she is doing those things. She'll take her pretend phone off the hook of her pretend kitchen, pretend to dial and then wait for the ringing. I'll ask her who she's calling and she'll say "Nana" or "Grandpa" or even Jacob. (she's called Uncle Todd and Dea too). Once the phone has rung, she'll say "hello?" and then have a full one-sided conversation with the plastic phone, complete with "uh-huh"s and "OK"s and she talks about a lot of stuff. Here's a transcript of one of her recent phone conversations:

"I'm calling Jacob! ... Hello Jacob! ... Oh, Yes ... yep ... wow!... OK, Bye!"

She also likes to pretend to drive the car. Grandpa has taken Sophia into the front seat of their car to play and she loves to pretend to drive, making "vroom vroom" noises and "honk honk". She also makes noises like that when playing with her airplane toys: "VROOM, neearow" etc. (hard to make up onomatopoeias sometimes...)



When we are driving, if we're at a stoplight she'll say "go go daddy" or "go go mommy" depending on who's driving, and we say "What colour is the light?" and she has learned that red light means stop, and green light means go. When we were out for a walk one day, she started to say "red light" and "green light," and we stopped and then went on. We have never taught her that game, she more or less made it up herself. I find that pretty cool.

She has also begun pretending to pick up objects - a tea party doesn't necessarily have to have teacups. She pours from an imaginary kettle into an imaginary cup and hands it to me, and I take an imaginary sip. I think this is a significant cognitive step. She will also pretend to pick up things she sees in magazine and book photographs. She has on more than one occasion fed me an apple or a hamburger or a carrot from pictures in a book. She'll pick one up and put it in her mouth, then she'll pick up another and put it in my mouth. I think this started with a rattle that we got for Jacob, in the shape of an elephant with little peanuts in a sphere meant to be his belly - it acts like a rattle. Sophia tried to get at the peanuts, and when she saw she couldn't actually pick one up, she pretended to get one and give it to me.

Oh, and she also likes to pretend to be a robot: