pretending

after ava came home from thunder bay, she and grandma spent a week doing their usual thing in san francisco. this picture that grandma took illustrates one of my favourite new ava features : she pretends things. here, she is pretending to feed the turtle.

her pretend sessions frequently involve food. one of the earliest that we noticed was in mid-august. ava was sitting in her car seat in the back of the car, pretending to eat potato chips out of a crinkly plastic bag. this was a little baffling as a) we've never fed her potato chips and b) we've very rarely given her any food out of a bag (until recently, this was beyond her co-ordination).

another common theme is crawling into small spaces. here she's hiding under her high chair, but we've also found her in the cubby beside the speakers, inside her laundry basket and inside the lockers at the swimming pool.