Since it's spring, the sweet girl is once more pretending to be a caterpillar who turns into a butterfly each evening. She started this last spring, and all through the rest of the year kept telling us that when spring came round again, she planned to be a caterpillar/butterfly once more.
The other night she threw her blanket over her head (her "chrysalis"). From inside, I heard her muffled voice. "I'm a caterpillar. My name is 'I Drem of Flying.'"
"What's your name?" I asked, not sure I'd heard her correctly (between the cotton-y folds of her cocoon and my continuing hearing problems)!
"I Drem of Flying," she repeated.
"Drem? Don't you mean DREAM?" I inquired.
"No, drem. Drem is a fancy way of saying dream."
It wasn't until later, when she brought "drem" up again, that I discovered the creative connection she'd made in her brain. She was recalling a poem we'd read weeks ago that used the word "dreamt" -- I had explained then that it was a fancier, poetic way of saying "dreamed."
I get to be a caterpillar too, by the way. She wanted me to pick a name as well. So I am now "I Wish to Soar."
6 comments:
As someone who's always wanted to take to the skies myself, I love both your caterpillar names! And I think that conjugation of "dreamt" was very clever!
Hee! Yes, I like the clever conjugation too.
Go on, pick a caterpillar name! ;-)
Oh, I love the creative way children use language. When our youngest was about 4, maybe younger, she saw a garter snake in the garden and kept talking about "sneaks", especially after her aunt gave her a stuffed one. We thought it was cute and called them sneaks as well. At some point, though, I said, "You do know that the word is really 'snake'?" "Yes, I know, but I like sneak better." So sneaks they remained.
Pat
Wonderful! I have a feeling most families have their own creative words and phrases from days when their kids were young. Some of them linger on and on. My older sister (when very young!) once looked out at a rainy morning and bemoaned "It's been fraining all morty." And over 40 years later, I'd be willing to bet that all of us siblings (and probably my parents) say that very thing almost every time we look out on a very rainy morning!
This morning my daughter commented on some instrumental music we were listening to. She called it "instrumentalistic." :-)
I like sneaks for snakes. There's something Biblical about that one. :-)
It's very drab here today, so instead of flight, I've got colors on my mind. Therefore... I Yearn to Glitter.
When Benjamin was about five, we got a small Casio keyboard. He decided that its proper name was a keyata, and ever since we've had a habit of calling every keyboard a keyata!
I love "I Yearn to Glitter." I think periodically we should come up with these kinds of names for ourselves! :-)
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