May 25, 2003 - Sunday
It's been a while since Harry started pretending; a few months anyway. He'll often make up little stories and scenarios for his trains, although they have generally tended to a striking similarity to the stories of Thomas the Tank Engine and friends from his book or from the videos that we have started to get from the library. His favorite stories, regretfully, are those that involve one kind of crash or another and so the paint is now chipping off many of his engines.

Today, however, I heard Harry talking and pretending and including himself in the exchange and that seems a little different; very typical of a child, of course, but somehow a different level of extrapolation. It's not literally the first time I've heard him do such a thing, but it's fairly new behavior. He had just been given a time out and was sitting on the sofa for being particularly nasty and ill-behaved prior to dinner (it's admittedly an awkward time, but usually more for Jeremy, because he truly gets hungry, than it is for Harry, who seemed just to be acting overtly contrary). As he sat calmly on the sofa, seemingly accepting his time out with surprising maturity (especially given the attitude that got him there), he was visible through the hearth that separates the living room from the kitchen and I could hear him talking through an imaginary scene that involved, I think, one of his stuffed animal friends getting scolded by him for, I couldn't hear too well, some sort of misbehavior that sounded remarkably similar to Harry's own transgression. Of course, that lack of originality is similar to replaying stories from the Thomas the Tank Engine books, but here he's no longer just the narrator. I'm no expert on this stuff, but that seems like new territory in learning where he fits in the world.


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