For about an hour this morning, my kids and I found a game we could all play together (mostly) in harmony with everyone having fun. I have no idea what the name of it is. It involves a logging truck, a sick baby, a laundry basket, and squeaking llama. Something for everybody, I guess.
You see, one of my son's birthday gifts on Tuesday was a wooden tractor-trailer that hauls a set of 5 (I counted for inevitable losses) logs strapped down with a buckle. But the game really started when my daughter called me into her room to help assist with her "sick baby." She's obsessed with doctors, illness, the human body...all in a completely healthy way, mind you. She just loves muscles and bones and handing out pretend medicine while telling those who come around to be quiet because her doll is sick. Her doll is always sick. Sometimes her doll recovers. But mostly her doll just gets sick again.
By this point, the doll is in one of my daughter's t-shirts from the laundry basket. We've made a bed on the floor out of blankets and we're all quietly waiting for (unnamed) doll's medicine to kick in. That's when my son makes an entrance with his log truck. Er, no, let me back up...he makes an entrance to tell us, "log truck has a surprise for you!"
"Oh, really? What is it?"
"Logs!"
Gosh, who would have seen that one coming?
So my son begins to hand out logs. One to the stuffed llama with the squeaker inside. One for the sick baby. One for me. One for Leda. One for he and his blankie to share. Somehow we all end up laying on the floor snuggling this one sick doll...until the llama squeaks and "wakes" my son up.
It's about this time that my daughter decides the baby is now sick enough that it needs to be driven to the hospital. So she dumps all the dirty laundry out of the basket and climbs in her "car" to go "to Chicago"--which is, apparently, where the nearest hospital is capable of handling this disease?
Things get a little weird here so I'm not sure if we ever make it. Nap time came quickly once my son informed us that...actually...we live on an island. So that's a monkey wrench. Somehow he ends up in the laundry basket car--maybe there's a bridge?--but doesn't now how to drive it. So we spend a good 5 minutes with her trying to show him how to drive a laundry basket automobile.
Is there a bridge? Is it an underwater car? We'll never know. It was time for chocolate milk and the game kind of fell apart as quickly as it started. Not 2 hours earlier, there had been a huge fight over a new piece of Thomas and Friends track where both kids were crying and one ended up with a scratched face.
I'll consider an hour of pretend to be a victory for getting along. Even if it involves lumberjacks who deliver shipments of unfinished wood to sick pediatric patients. In the twisted world of a 2 and 4 year old, it made sense at the time.