When I was a girl, my favorite thing to play was "pretend," and my favorite person to play it with was my bestest friend Lauren. She and I had a rhythm going that could last for hours. We used our Cabbage Patch Kids as our babies, my room's radiator and windows as our airplane, her grandmother's bed as our boat.
This weekend, I noticed Eli transporting an armload full of objects from his bed to our bed, like he was stocking up to hibernate in there. My first instinct was to shut him down. We were going to end with loads of toy cars and Daniel Tiger figures in our bed and it was going to be a pain to clear off and why was all that stuff in there anyway?
But it was Sunday, and we didn't have anywhere to be for several hours. So I settled in on the bed and made myself comfortable. Then I remembered how much fun Lauren and I used to have playing for hours on side-by-side twin beds at her grandmother's house, each of us pretending to be on a boat. (Usually one of us was on a yacht and the other was on a rickety dinghy and there was a definite socioeconomic clash going on in the ocean.) "Look," I said to Eli, rocking back and forth, "it's like we're on a boat."
His eyes lit up. "We're at the beach! Jungle Beach!" he exclaimed. (Jungle Beach, in case you are uninformed, is where Daniel Tiger lives.)
I grabbed his whale blanket and spread it out over some pillows. "Look, here's the water," I said. He grabbed another blanket and spread it out over the bedspread. "Here's the sand!" he sang. "Scoop scoop scoop!"
After that, we were on a roll. He left to go get his soft blankie but carefully placed it on the dresser because "it's gonna get all sandy." We scooped in the sand for a while and then Eli dove into the water. "Uh-oh, the water's all wet!" he yelled. "Splash! Splash!" Then he pretended to shiver. "It's cold," he said. So I invited him to dry off on the sand.
Just then, Phil returned home from walking the dog. "Daddy! Come and play on Jungle Beach with us!" Eli called. Phil asked if we should build a sand castle. When Eli enthusiastically agreed, Phil started stacking Legos. Eli's expression darkened.
"Not with Legos. With sand," he scolded, and started shaping pretend sand with his hands. "Like this! Scoop scoop scoop!"
Then the three of us lay down together, shoulder to shoulder, relaxing in the sun.
"This is nice," I said to Eli. "It's nice to be on the beach with you."
"Yeah," he said.
It was one of those days where I flashed back to the first time I saw baby Eli hold a 'phone' to his ear or the first time he pretended to go swimming in the bath and I was amazed at what a privilege it is to watch these cool developmental leaps. Like just when you think your toddler is a completely irrational creature who lives only for demanding yogurt at inopportune times or refusing to nap, he goes and develops a complex theory of mind and it's so much fun.
We've been playing Jungle Beach for days now, taking good long swims in the water and building elaborate sand castles out of MagnaTiles and then relaxing under our shady umbrella. Outside the winter is finally drawing to a close, but inside the summer is already here.
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