Gizmo my youngest is very into pretending. This started out with pretending to be animals. If she wanted to be a kitty she would actually be a kitty for most of the day and sometimes for a couple days at a time.

She also liked for me to pretend to be what she was pretending to be, so if she was a kitty cat I needed to pretend to be a mamma cat..which I usually didn’t mind( although there were probably a few times out in public where people might’ve wondered what was up with the two humans meowing at each other). We had just gotten cats at the time so I figured that this was an extension of that;of observing their behavior.

But then she started to pretend to be a monkey for a while(and yes I pretended to be a mommy monkey too. )

I like that she pretends and it seems to be a normal kid thing that my first born never took to the level that my youngest does- it’s always interesting to me how into her pretend play that she gets and the ideas that she comes up with!

I’ve written about Mars girl before and she was a favorite for a very long while. She came out one day dressed up in odd clothes and said she was an alien and it only took my husband or I asking if she was an alien from Mars to make that idea take root. From there Mars girl became a visitor that popped by for visits once a day or so. Gizmo always left the room at the end of the visit and then came back rubbing her eyes as if she had been asleep pretending to be upset that she had missed the visit..again. She even chose to see the Christmas Lights as Mars Girl last year which was an interesting experience as it meant I got to ask if Christmas lights were used on Mars. This discussion led to Gizmo deciding that not only were Christmas lights used on Mars we were actually walking through Mars and it was our family who had decided to visit her home this time.

This annoyed the Kid a little because she can’t really understand why Gizmo makes up these scenarios and why I indulge her in them.   I do think it’s a good thing though, and not only for Gizmo, for the Kid as well. I think it opens the door for her to pretend too and the kid has come up with a few good pretends herself. Gizmo decided we were really visiting “Underland“(what she calls Wonderland )whenever we visited our Botanical Gardens, but the kid really expanded on that and made our day a pretty fun experience. The next day it was the Kid who decided the tunnels at our favorite park were really part of  the Labyrinth  and they had a lot of fun with that idea for many, many weekends.

Mars girl has been missing for a few weeks and I wondered if maybe Giz was growing out of her pretending stage.

And then Monster girl showed up. Gizmo came out of her room Wednesday and she had peeled the stickers off a caterpillar we had made together and placed them on the palms of her hands, on her face and on her toes and she let me know that she was monster girl but that she needed a tail.

I fixed her one out of chenille pipe cleaners and she started taking some out of the box herself and making herself fur- which just ended up being bracelets and anklets. She was wearing pigtails and I couldn’t  resist decorating those too and then she had to go show her daddy that a monster was in the house.

Monster girl, I am told, has a daddy monster who does silly stuff and she is just a little monster but has to do silly stuff as well. Silly stuff it turns out equals hiding half eaten apples on top of clean plates in their dish drawer and trying to scare our cat(he’s not amused).

I’m hoping the silly stuff doesn’t lead to my finding too many “surprises” and just curious to see what happens next.