19-Jun-08 - Playing Boat

I emerged from the bathroom this morning to hear Parker, lying obediently in bed, singing "Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, to the cross where Thou hast died..." He skipped the usual power struggle this morning. Most mornings, he gets up and comes in to our bedroom, asks to have his nighttime diaper removed, and then goes back to bed to wait until it is time to get up. Well, that's the plan. Actually, there's a lot of whining, and rolling around stubbornly on the floor, and finally dragging his heels, and then emerging again 45 seconds later. Maybe it's because Damian got to him first, but today, after the diaper came off, he went straight to his potty and then cheerfully back to bed for the 20 minutes it took me to come get him. They're so cute when they obey!

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The boys went on Dziadek's and Babcia's boat for the first time this past weekend. Since then they have come up with imaginative ways to "play boat," as I call it. They stand on their play table and jump off into the "water." (Never mind that they found it completely distressing when Daddy jumped from the boat into the lake for a dip. They seem to have gotten over that.) They then move on over to the kitchen linoleum, where they can spin on their rears, slide on their tummies, or otherwise imitate swimming.

Today Liam has built a LEGO boat setup, complete with truck, trailer hitch, and trailer. When he announced he was going to build a boat trailer, I began to picture ways of making the boat to go on it. When he produced a boat of his own (on right in pic, riding atop the trailer), I was a little shocked to find that, while I had been planning various ways to shape the exterior of a boat, he had produced a workable replica of the interior of Dziadek's boat. Of course, why didn't this occur to me? Far more important to imagine yourself sitting at the wheel than to accurately portray the external dynamics of the boat in the water. To see that, you would have to be looking at someone else's boat. Who cares about that?