The Angry Bear

Nora Lee spends much of the day in imaginary play. From the time we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed the whole family participates in pretend worlds. We have some regular games that we play and some that spontaneously happen in the moment. Nora Lee's language skills are incredibly good and she is intensely inquisitive. She asks many times each day, "What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Why did he say that? Why did you laugh at that?", Etc. This has been challenging for me because I try to answer her questions as best I can but some of them are complicated answers - and it just gets tiring :) As a way of lightening my mood when the questioning drives me bonkers, I begin responding with an old improv game. When she says, "What are you doing?" I respond with something like " Flying a kite, what are you doing?" and she will say "Climbing a mountain, what are you doing?" We can go back and forth like that for quite a while.

She loves for us to make up stories and in the last few days Matt told her stories about mean bears. (Nora Lee is fascinated with being "mean" and being "nice". Our household is regularly visited by both mean and nice animals. When a mean one comes, we cower in fear and pretend to cry and she protects us. When nice animals come we snuggle them.)

In Matt's recent stories about the "angry bears" he shared that angry bears are really just sad bears. This evening something made Matt angry and he calmly said "That makes me really angry." Nora Lee went up to him and said "You not angry daddy, you a bear. You not angry you just sad."

Wow.