"Kate, look into the camera please." Results in a strange contortion of a pose usually. Funny.

Imagination is big in our house right now. Four year olds don't have a clear line of demarcation between real and unreal, so we've been working on understanding more of that. It's hard to figure out if stories about school really happened or if they were perhaps made up or slightly altered. Kate kept talking about a little boy named Christian who said all sorts of not very nice things to her. Christian, it turns out, hadn't been at the school for over 7 weeks!

Her brothers will tell her she is a liar when she tells them something they know not to be entirely true. Liar is such a negative word, and I've asked them not to use it anymore and explained to them that this is a stage in a child's development where she's still learning what is real for everyone and what is real for just her.

We don't call it lies. We call it imagination. She plays imagining quite a bit. While I'm typing this she asked me if she could imagine she's a mommy. Of course she can, imagining is always fine, and she doesn't have to ask me.

Kate has imaginary dogs, imaginary dinosaurs and she loves to imagine that all her toys are real.She re-enacts and imagines episodes from her favorite tv shows. It happens while she's watching and it happens after the fact, when she rearranges the stories to fit her own ideas. She uses any toy that she can find to match the personalities. Right now she's playing with Olivia and a random cat and dog. (Kate: "Mom, do you mind if we imagine this Olivia's house? You don't have to be a pig, no one has to be a pig, she just lives here.")

Gosh, I love this. In all my years of yearning to be a mom, I didn't know how cool it can be when your kid takes you on a journey in her imagination.

She watches more tv than I thought I'd let her before I became her mom! It serves to fuel her imagination though, that makes it less bad, right? (Note the tv reflection in her eyes in the photo below!)