Quote of the day

From Crunchy Con (the comments): "I have a friend who won't eat tongue either--he says it's just too strange to taste something that might be tasting you back."

As I mentioned, David's creative play lately has really advanced--especially with the Legos ("Duplo" actually). Shortly after seeing WALL-E, he enrolled Jaime's to build a WALL-E with legos, which he cherished. The next day I added a couple of pieces to represent eye-stalks and snapped the eyes to the top. He imediately tilted the eyes downward as far as the legos would allow, telling me that WALL-E has to have "sad eyes."

Last week, he built a Buzz Lightyear on his own. To me it looks like WALL-E's strung-out cousin, but I am very content--elated would be the word--that he is now happy for his legos to stand in for purchasing additional, costly toys. Now you will notice that his "creativity" is still largely confined to the world of Pixar. But it could be worse and I recall that most of my imaginitive play also revolved around someone else's prefab imaginary universe. That is how we begin. Uniqueness comes after Uniqua, as they say.

However, we have road bumps ahead. A couple of days ago David was playing with his lego Buzz and a McDonalds toy was standing in as the Emperor Zurg. He was reinacting the climactic "you killed my father" scene. It occurred to me that David will eventually see "The Empire Strikes Back" and when he sees the very dramatic scene where Vader reveals Luke's parentage, he will scoff that they totally took that from "Toy Story II." Additionally, legos have their limits. He asked me this weekend to help him build "Eve" out of legos. "Um, Eve is pretty much the anti-lego" I explained, unless he were to melt them down to an egg shape and paint them white.

His creativity also extends to drawing which he does rarely, but which now focusses more on the figure--sorta. A bizarre arrangement of shapes and lines with a small circle somewhere in the center is any number of people. He drew one of these "people" in gravel with a stick a few days ago. Very cute.

Priorities

What does it say about us that Jaime's Amazon.com wish list combined with mine still contains fewer items than our Netflix cue?

Yes please

David: Yes
Simon: Yes
D: Please
S: Pwease
D: Yes, please
S: Pwes, yease
D: Good job!

Simon's language is actually coming along very nicely. He understands most questions asked of him and is able to answer in some way. His "please" and "thank you" are very good. He regularly uses two-and-three-word sentences like

"Done daddy car?" ("are we done in daddy's care" (ie, "have we arrived?")
"Watch daddy!"
"I don't want to!"
"Why, daddy?"

This last one is particularly interesting. As I recall, Simon is not yet at the typical "why" age, but he has picked the habit up from David. He is picking lots of age inappropriate things up from David. His imaginative play is far more advanced than David's was at 23 month because he spends so much time imitating his big brother. So as David gets more elaborate with lego play, super hero play and the like Simon is right there with him soaking it up. I predict that this, along with the generally lower level of directive attention we give, could contribute to him being a more imaginative of the two.

Later imaginary friends

Burton Depp

Seven Children's Tales That Tim Burton & Johnny Depp Should Remake.

Of course I generally disagree with the author's assessment of the Burton/Depp corpus (no pun intended). While it is a mixed bag, I quite like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Nightmare before Christmas. To this list, I would seriously restate my desire to see them remake The Wizard of Oz.