Friends

Nat seems to be cultivating an "Imaginary Friend." Every now and then she will make a reference to "Robot." For example, she'll tell us "everybody's here! Cole-Mom, Mama Shannon, Nat and Robot!" We have to remind her that Selina is "here" too in these instances. The other day, she offered me some imaginary birthday cake and I imaginarily ate it and when she offered me more, I told her no thanks, I was full, so she said "okay, here you go Robot!"

There are robot toys in one of her books (but no information about what they are--it's just a big pile of them) and one of her episodes of Between the Lions features a robot, but not centrally (and again, with no real info on what a robot is), so I haven't been sure exactly where she got the idea or if Robot is an actual robot, or just some person or other entity called "Robot" because she likes the word.

Then today, we were discussing what we should have for a snack and she announced "Robot doesn't like to eat." I asked her why that is and she replied "Robots don't eat food!" So I guess maybe Robot is a robot, but I still, for the life of me, have no idea where she got this concept of robots and whether they eat or not. (Clearly this is a new piece of information, since he was eating imaginary birthday cake last week!) Maybe it's not robot information at all, but imaginary friend information?

Time to grill the babysitters, I guess. Maybe they're sneaking her Nova or something.

Comments

[Dori]

Awe!! That's so cute! It reminds me of the imaginary friend my daughter had when she was very little. His name was Fredrick and he lived in the pantry...

[pharmgirl]

We have an imaginary friend at our house too.
We just consider her one of the family.
Sometimes I make up stories about her and he reminds me that she's not real.
Kids are great people.

[Allie]

I miss our boy's imaginary friends. He had a whole family when he was four. His main one was another boy called Marmite (British product that we spread on bread) and the rest of his family were two dads (peanut butter and tofu) and a baby sister called butter. I think it's a fascinating stage of development.

[Susan]

How fun! Imaginary friends are enormously entertaining for the whole family.