[blparent] Creativity and Imaginary Friends

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

Hi.  I was wondering when you all first noticed imagination in your kids.  Sarah is just now two and a half, and she's really amazed me lately with some of the stuff she's come up with.

First it was Maggie.  A couple of months ago, Sarah saw her reflection in a computer monitor on my desk, and even though she knows herself by sight in a mirror, that reflection became Maggie.  Sarah won't mention Maggie all the time, but now and then, she'll greet her on the way past the desk.

Then, in the last couple of weeks, Sarah started talking about a pink cake on the wall of a garage near our condo.  She came up with a whole story about how somebody was carrying a pink cake and crashed it into the wall.  I asked a sighted friend if she saw anything unusual on that wall, and she said there was a big splotch of pink paint, probably graffiti.  She said it was "little girl frosting" pink.  So that's how the pink cake came to be.

Last week, Sarah and I were outside, and she said there were baby animals under the big pine tree in the front yard.  She led me by the hand to investigate, and the baby animals--horses, lions, birds, monkeys--turned out to be pine cones.  I tried to explain to her what the pine cones really were, but to her, they were baby animals.  So she decided we couldn't leave the baby animals all alone, and she wanted to take them to see another imaginary character--a yellow farmer--which it turns out is the fire plug at the edge of our parking lot.  I don't know what the neighbors must have thought of the two of us walking back and forth, back and forth, carrying pine cones from the tree to the fire plug--Sarah could only hold a few animals at a time, and she wasn't interested in my help.  She arranged the animals around the fire plug farmer and wasn't satisfied till she'd gotten all of them into his care.

I've really had fun watching Sarah's imagination blossom, so I'm wondering if all of these elaborate stories and characters are something common to most children, or if this is anything I need to be concerned about.

Jo Elizabeth