Imagine That!

We worked some more on imagining how we'd feel in different situations. It was really encouraging. For example, I said, "Let's imagine that the doorbell rings--ding dong. And you run over to the door and open it up. And Laura's there!" The Lark laughed and jumped up and down. Then he jumped on my lap and hugged me in excitement. I said, "How would you feel?!" He was too excited to say, but he was clearly feeling it. I said, "Happy or sad?" He said, "Happy!" with real enthusiasm. The cool thing was that, first of all, he was obviously really imagining it. And what was even cooler was this: he understood that it was a game, and that we were just imagining. In the past, he might have run over to the door and flung it open, and then been confused and disappointed. But he really got the pleasure of just pretending. (Next time I'll try to work in some actual pretend play instead of just talking about it.) I gave him a couple of other scenarios, and he really enjoyed the whole thing.