agglutinative character creation in imaginative play
Another post about Lijah, since I get to spend so much time with him these days. He likes to play imaginative games with us—well, sort of imaginative. Mostly it's about deciding what character he wants to be, and then announcing it repeatedly. For a while it was pretty simple: a cat, or a pirate, or spiderman (in rough chronological order). But then he started to get a little more baroque. For example, on the playground the other day he and I (with a little assistance from Zion) played a rousing game of robot pirate bugs.
Then yesterday it got even more confusing, when he decided he was a robot dinosaur pirate baby. I said I could be the mama, so after a little while—and I should reiterate just how many times he announces what he is, to the point that it forms at least fifty percent of the play dialogue—he said something like, "ok, I'm the baby robot dinosaur pirate baby and you're the mama robot dinosaur pirate baby." I guess it makes sense at some level, and I was happy to roll with it for a minute or two until he changed me into something else. I can't wait until he's writing stories down someday...