Imagination

I've noticed a change in Penny's imagination recently. She seems to have shifted into the realm of being able to pretend in abstract. I've read that the earliest imagination is using a phone and pretending it is a phone, but using a shoe and pretending it is a phone comes later. I've noticed her doing stuff like pretending her legos are salt and pepper shakers, and then a minute later the same lego transforms into a cup or something else.

We still have the box that our dishwasher came in because we gave it to Penny to use as a playhouse. I cut out a door and two windows for her. She doesn't play in it everyday, but every time we think about throwing it out she'll wind up playing with it that day and we end up keeping it a bit longer. Anyway, I painted the lower cabinets in our kitchen this weekend, and I'd taken the doors off and put them back on with a screwdriver. She took the screwdriver and went to work on her "robot house" (which is what she calls the dishwasher box). She was miming me screwing things into the side of her house and then she pretended to cut out new windows with it and was just doing all sorts of construction-y type things to her robot house with the screwdriver. She was really putting some imagination into "working on it." I stopped what I was doing and just watched her for a bit. It was so cool.