Gallant has been enjoying having me home more during Winter Break from my LCC math teaching.
And I have been enjoying his company too. His imagination is growing rapidly, largely due to overhearing the type of pretending his older brother does.
The other day he and I were playing a game he invented. He was holding his InnoTab and pretending the headphone jack shot out ropes and vines. We got in a pretend spaceship to travel to the Jungle World, where we needed to rescue the good monkeys. They were up in the trees: he would shoot them, and I would pretend to catch them as they fell and then carry them back to our spaceship. We had to work fast or the bad monkeys would arrive and get the good monkeys!
It sounds very random. But "vine whip" is an entangling Pokemon attack he knows from the stories his big brother's makes up. And Smiley also uses the vocabulary of "worlds", often starting one of his stories by explaining something like "This is a world like Chima but it also has Pokemon in it, and all the buildings are made out of ice." So I can trace the seeds of most of Gallant's concepts.
But I am not sure what made Gallant recently think about meatballs. We have not eaten any in a long time. Perhaps they appeared in an episode of the
Curious George cartoons.
Earlier this month, he picked up a toy helicopter and started flying it around. "It's dropping meatballs," he shared.
Huh?
What was especially odd was that he did not make his "laugh with me" giggle he usually uses when trying to be funny.
Then nothing about meatballs for more than a week.
Then, yesterday, he was playing with legos, and for the first time was using one of those old school lego-minifigure astronaut air tanks. When I was a boy I always pretended they were jet-packs. So I asked him, "Is that a jet-pack?" He replied, "No, it is a backpack of meatballs."
Really? Some things I will never understand.
