Play Time

These days Little Cherub spends much of her time engrossed in intense pretend play. I thought it would be interesting to jot down a few notes about how she currently plays, and then to see how it develops over time.

• Favourite toys - Playmobil and other small figures, dolls' house, baby dolls, play food.

• Imaginative play - lots of time talking to her little people and staging conversations between them. I overhear things like " You have been very naughty and you have to go to bed", and "You can sit at the computer now". Her people have a lot of pretend birthdays, complete with pretend birthday cake and candles. They talk to each other, but she doesn't yet make up names, so a Mummy addresses her children as "Girl" or "Boy" or "Baby". She also alters her voice according to who is talking. She likes setting up domestic scenes - people sitting at a table, children put to bed, families going for a ride in a car. She will get dressed up in outdoor gear to go to pretend shops to buy imaginary sweets. I have to open the imaginary wrapping for her, then help eat the invisible contents. Lots of pretend meals with play food. She will ask what we want, then "cook" it. This morning she spent half an hour in bed pretending to visit houses with a couple of soft toys.
  

• Playing with dolls - lots of role play, doing all the things you would expect with babies ... feeding, dressing, bathing, taking them for walks, changing nappies.

• Adores her Peppa Pig beanie baby (the one pictured sitting on the door ledge of the washer in the post below). Takes Peppa everywhere, and has lots of conversations with her.

• Loves games. Mainly simple "collecting" games ... Lotto, Tummy Ache (collecting food cards to flll a meal board without getting any tummy ache cards), one where you collect parts of a bug by rolling a die and matching numbers, another collecting jungle animals using a spinner. She likes animal dominoes, but sometimes insists she has to have all the "double" dominoes, which kind of messes up the game! She is just starting to get the idea of board games and loves The Peter Rabbit Radish Game we bought back from the Lake District for her, even though it is really too complex. If she is in the mood she can just about manage to count spaces on the board, but mostly she wants us to do it for her.

• Not in a puzzle phase at the moment. She went through a spell last year of loving jigsaws, but that has passed and she rarely takes them out.
  

• Building toys - Duplo, sticklebricks, blocks - are also off her playing radar at the moment. Star and my brother often get the Lego out on Sundays and she sometimes asks for it at other times.
  

• Also not particularly into drawing and colouring, after a spell when she got pencils and crayons out every day. Interesting to see how these things go through a period of intensity and then fade for a while.