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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Reality and Stickers

"The soul never thinks without a picture. " -Aristotle

Currently, for Maeve, there is no difference to her between a picture of a thing and the thing itself.  She 'catches' balls that are in pictures, she tried to climb into the boat in The Runaway Bunny, and if you leave her alone with stickers with pictures of food, she will eat them.

We have a sticker of a watering can on our porch, where my plants are.  Maeve has destroyed all the stickers of doctor items (tongue depressors, stethoscope, etc) from playing with them too much, particularly the tongue depressors which went in and out of her mouth quite a bit while she bellowed "AHHHH!"

This lack of distinction also presents a problem when she wants to 'have' something from one of her books.  "I have it!" she begs, and grabs at the picture in question.  And I am torn between explaining to her that it's just a picture and wanting her to keep her belief that the world of images is as real as she is.  I don't want to shatter her illusions, I just don't want to disappoint her when she can't catch the ball or steal Cookie Monster's cookies.

 Mostly I play along, "Oh, are you going to climb up? Did you catch the ball?" and try to remove the stickers from her mouth as quickly as I can.  But I kind of like finding them all over the house, it makes me feel even more like a mom, affording me the opportunity to say or think How in the world did that get there?
She has definitely tried to climb the tree on the left.

1 comment:

  1. That's very funny! What a great imagination. Love the new photo of you two :)

    ReplyDelete