I was gone for most of the weekend at one of my bonspiels, so as usual, the kids at least seemed to give some show of having missed me while I was gone. (Now, we all know that they really don’t care, one way or the other, when I’m gone, since they love Mommy more and I’m the disciplinarian. But it’s nice that they pretend. 😉 ) But I returned yesterday evening, and while the wife and I were preparing food in the kitchen, the Monster came wandering in.
Of late, the Monster’s been on a voracious tear through our pantries. (He’s not yet decided to help himself, though there are times enough that he’s gone into the fridge… not that he’s known what to do with the things he pulls out.) We think he must be on a growth spurt or something, since he’s asking to eat every 10-15 minutes.
But this wasn’t why he came in to visit. Instead, he waddled over to me and looked up at me for a few moments, before I looked down at him, and asked what was on his mind.
“Kiss your robot,” he said.
This took a few repetitions, while we were figuring out what he was saying, and what he was trying to say. I’ve mentioned before that he tends to use fill-ins – “banana” can mean one of thousands of things, as can his shrieks for “Car!” or “Playground!” (Though the latter ones are, more often than not, literal.) But he was being adamant with the wording. Kiss your robot. Kiss your robot.
So I kissed him on the forehead.
“Beep! Beep!” he said back to me after I’d done that. “Robot. Kiss your robot!”
I’m not quite sure where he picked this one up, but it’s definitely a change that we’d not seen before – it’s imaginative play, after a fashion, that he’s showing he can actually do pretend-acting. I’m sure that we’ll find out that it’s scripting off something he’s seen on his iPad or on TV, but it’s a step forward…