Pretending

I love to watch my girls pretend.  Their little imaginations are so funny and amazing and beautiful.  They take their favorite parts of their favorite stories and mix them all up to make a whole new story.  They play off of each other and come up with entirely new scenarios.  I can't get enough of it.  

It helps that recently I scored a few great dress-up bargains for them.  Our at-home dress up was kind of pitiful, so I found one princess dress at an online consignment shop (with a 40% off coupon too!), got a bag full of three other outfits plus jewelry from Craigslist for cheap, pulled out an old flower girl dress, and presto!  We have dress up.

True to their personalities, Miss changes from one outfit to another, depending on what she's doing.

While Lass finds one outfit and stays with it.  She may change her accessories, but she's not giving up that green Tinkerbell outfit, which she calls her "fit" (outfit).  She puts it on and beams, "I Wedda!" (I'm Cinderella!)

They try to dress up Sis too so she won't feel left out.

We have been tea-partying like crazy here.  Miss always insists on putting on the purple dress for the tea parties.

We have lots of "Cheers!" and pinkies out and all that.

Sis is loving her Bumbo, which allows her to be part of the action.

I love to see how the girls interpret the stories they read and see in videos.  At one point Miss was pretending that the Evil Queen had stolen Snow White's voice (like Ursula does to Ariel).  She has started having lots of fun with trying to get us to read her lips.  Today at lunch she said, "Momma, do you know what I'm saying?" and she kept mouthing the same thing over and over, in a really exaggerated way.  I really tried, but I had no idea what it was.  Finally she sighed and said, "Mom, I was saying 'Casey Jones'!!" As in the train from the Dumbo book.  Oh.  Duh.

They love to have me be the Evil Queen and act out the poisoned apple scene.  Here they were running away from me as Evil Queen.

I "convinced" Miss to taste the poisoned apple.

She fell dramatically to the floor.

Then she called to her sister, "Come on and kiss me so I can wake up!"

They did this over and over.  They make me laugh.

Of course, we don't only play Princess.  We play Chef and Mommy and today they were Doctors.

Lass loves to hold the play stethoscope up to my leg (or arm or nose) and say, "Momma you sick!"

I laugh a lot these days.