Land of Make-Believe

 

Let’s start this Friday by wishing my mom a happy birthday! She reads the blog every day, so if you leave her some birthday love in the comments, she’ll see it! Happy birthday, Mom! Looking forward to seeing you this weekend and celebrating your 21 years on this earth! 😊

            Yesterday I was talking with a friend, and she told me some stories about her three-year-old who has just started preschool and discovered the land of make-believe. The stories made me laugh and reminded me of my own imagination-overloaded childhood.

            I was raised as an only child, since my sisters were almost out of the house by the time I showed up, and I loved playing house, school, church…the whole bit.

            My mom worked in a first grade classroom, and sometimes at the end of a school year, when the teacher cleaned out her excess worksheets, she’d give them to me to play with in my make-believe school at home. I’d pull the tall trash can out of the kitchen and pretend it was my podium. (It had a lid.) I would mark the rows of “desks” by placing worksheets in order around the living room and passionately teaching my students.

            I even crafted my own gradebook by drawing lines in a regular notebook, writing in names for students, and grading them on their worksheets. Somewhere in my old pictures, I think I have one Mom took of me standing over that trash can podium, preparing something for my classroom.

            Another memory I have of the make-believe years is when I would recreate the church choir loft. I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with my own creativity on this one.

            My childhood church had a choir loft that sat behind the platform. A half-wall separated the choir from the platform, and at either end, there was a swinging door that would allow the choir members to come to the platform if needed. (Sometimes they needed to get to microphones to sing solos. You remember microphones of the 80s, right? The brightly colored foam mic covers? Cords?)

            Another key piece of information about our church choir is that they wore light blue choir robes with white sashes.

            When I wanted to play choir at home, I’d wear my mom’s blue bathrobe, put a chair in my bedroom (which was the choir loft) and then I took my giant white flannel board and blocked my bedroom door with it. The flannel board was a big piece of Styrofoam comparable in size to a large bulletin board, covered in fabric that would hold my flannel graph story pieces. (You remember flannel graph stories, right?)

            The board was my swinging choir loft door! I would sit on the chair in my bedroom, sing from the hymnal, and when it was my turn for a solo (second day of never in real life), I’d swing open the flannel graph board, step into the hall, and sing right into my mom’s curling brush.

            There was more – much more – from my childhood. I once drew the entire dashboard and gear shift of a car and taped it to the back of the driver’s seat. I stuck a frisbee in the space between the head rest and the seat back and pulled it out to be my steering wheel, so I could drive wherever we went.

            I set up a drive-thru restaurant in my playhouse in the backyard. Mom bought me a little carbon copy ticket book, and I served many imaginary meals to cars driving…well, through our yard, apparently.

            I love hearing when kiddos today still use their imaginations! Did you have an active imagination when you were little?