Concerning Popcorn and Ducks

It's something of a multigenerational tradition in my family that Sunday night is popcorn night. I don't know why that is. Mom if you're reading this, care to weigh in?

At any rate, the Happy Boy has just turned one year old, and most of his first set of molars has come in. So we figured he's ready to be initiated into the cult. Now, we've been feeding him popcorn for a few weeks already; but up to this point we'd been breaking off bits of soft white stuff--without the hard yellow kernel shell--to give him to eat. But now, none of that mamby-pamby stuff any more! We put a few handfulls of popcorn directly onto his tray. And he did fine with it.

But... whichever one of us put him in his high-chair seat neglected to notice at the time the fact that he was concealing a small, squeaky-toy rubber ducky somewhere on his person. As I mentioned in a previous post (written shortly after we'd caught him smuggling a Cheerio in his belly button), he's a quick one; you have to keep an eye on him. But when we noticed the ducky (about the time we put popcorn on his tray), we figured, Hey, no harm. He'll probably just ignore the ducky until he's done with the popcorn, and then he'll try to cram the ducky in his mouth along with everything else.

Well, you'd think that. But much to my surprise, this twelve-month-old boy started trying to feed popcorn to the ducky. And I thought to myself: Amazing! That's imaginary play! That's pretending! And this kid is only twelve months old! Do twelve-month-olds do this? I don't remember seeing this kind of imaginary play at this age with my daughters, and I certainly don't remember reading in any child development book that pretending happens this young. This is amazing! We have a freaking genius here!

Mommy's theory was that this boy is, after all, the most social of our kids. He just likes being with other people and interacting with them. The Adrenaline Junkie, after all, is more social than the Pillowfight Fairy ever was, and also started pretend play at a younger age. Maybe these things go together? Hm. Interesting theory. But it could also be that she had a bigger sister that was modeling pretend play all over the place, so she picked it up at an earlier age. And the Happy Boy has two older sisters, so maybe he's just picking it up even earlier.

So while we were sitting there and marveling at our prodigy, the little genius then turned the ducky over, and tried to ram a piece of popcorn into the squeaky-hole on the bottom side. And since I'd been thinking up to this point, He's pretending that he's feeding the ducky, somehow I interpreted this new play as, well... as... um...

As something really disgusting. Ew....

But then the boy did something amazing: he whacked a piece of popcorn with the ducky. And the popcorn let out a squeak! The boy was astounded. So he whacked another piece of popcorn, and it squeaked too! So he happily started whacking all his pieces of popcorn with the ducky to see what they would do....

Squeak squeak squeak squeak...

That's my little genius. He makes me smile--a lot.