28 months: “Tiny little pink robot diamond-fish…”
I’m not sure where she found the tiny little pink robot diamond-fish. I didn’t know we had one. But there it was, held a few inches above my kid’s chubby face as she guided it through the air in a swirling, swimming motion.
It looked, by the way, exactly like a dull screw. If I hadn’t been informed of its true identity, I could have easily mistaken it for a tiny piece that fell out of a toy, or perhaps a piece of furniture. Luckily, thanks to my daughter noticing the fact that the screw was in fact a tiny little pink robot diamond-fish, its rarity did not go unappreciated.
Children are imaginative by nature, and it might be humanity’s biggest tragedy that we lose our imaginations as we age. I’m not the only person who remembers suddenly, at around twelve or thirteen years old, not being able to figure out just how playing in the rain worked, or what was involved in make-believe, or how it was that my stuffed animals ever seemed alive. And when, in my twenties, I observed the “tiny little pink robot diamond-fish” that looked exactly like a dull screw, I realized that there was no way that my grownup brain could have looked at it and seen anything besides a screw.
Creativity is the most beautiful thing about childhood, but we take it for granted and we don’t encourage it nearly enough. For every broccoli floret that becomes a tree, every firefly that becomes a fairy, and every screw that becomes a diamond-fish, I can consider myself to have earned another badge in parenthood.
I’m not sure where she found the tiny little pink robot diamond-fish. I didn’t know we had one. But there it was, held a few inches above my kid’s chubby face as she guided it through the air in a swirling, swimming motion.
It looked, by the way, exactly like a dull screw. If I hadn’t been informed of its true identity, I could have easily mistaken it for a tiny piece that fell out of a toy, or perhaps a piece of furniture. Luckily, thanks to my daughter noticing the fact that the screw was in fact a tiny little pink robot diamond-fish, its rarity did not go unappreciated.
Children are imaginative by nature, and it might be humanity’s biggest tragedy that we lose our imaginations as we age. I’m not the only person who remembers suddenly, at around twelve or thirteen years old, not being able to figure out just how playing in the rain worked, or what was involved in make-believe, or how it was that my stuffed animals ever seemed alive. And when, in my twenties, I observed the “tiny little pink robot diamond-fish” that looked exactly like a dull screw, I realized that there was no way that my grownup brain could have looked at it and seen anything besides a screw.
Creativity is the most beautiful thing about childhood, but we take it for granted and we don’t encourage it nearly enough. For every broccoli floret that becomes a tree, every firefly that becomes a fairy, and every screw that becomes a diamond-fish, I can consider myself to have earned another badge in parenthood.
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