Amusing Herself

Julia loves inventing new, engrossing games. Three ilustrations:
1. Monday night, she dug from her toy bin two old racquetballs I'd given her long ago. After experimentally tossing them onto the floor for a while, she accidentally bounced one under the crib, and it rolled over to me, sitting on the floor along the long side of her crib. A lightbulb went off in her head and sent her down to the adjacent end of the crib, where she positioned herself to roll the balls under the crib to me. I grabbed each one and rolled it back to her. She often missed them as they went by, which sent her into the corner of the room to get an escaping ball. But as soon as it was in hand, she'd get back in position, hunker down in her hilariously slo-mo way, and roll them back. We spent about 30 minutes doing this, and oddly it never got boring.

2. Wednesday night, after I cleaned up the dinner mess (how did the veggie burger crumbs get so far from the high chair? does she have a soy-protein cannon I don't know about?), I sat down on the floor with her to watch her play with her plastic letter magnets on the fridge. Apropos of nothing, she came over and started putting the magnets into the right pocket of my sweatshirt. After filling it with letters and starting to get a bit frustrated that they were falling out, she realized there was another pocket on the other side, and toddled around me - loudly saying, "Boo!" when she emerged from directly behind me - to start stuffing them into the left pocket. Retrieving extra letters from the fridge and taking some from the right pocket, she spent about 20 minutes sorting letters between the two pockets, always going around my extended legs when she was moving them from left to right but going around my back when it was a right-left exchange. Again, this never got boring, and it was even fun to tell her the name of the letters. Sometimes, as with J, she'd try to repeat it: "Zhaysh!"

3. When it was finally time for her bath, I told her to bring all her letters, too, and she spent about five minutes running back and forth between the kitchen, where I'd left all the letters, and the tub, shrieking with joy, yelling "Wun!" as she ran, and throwing the letters into the rising water. Then she spent her whole long bath - another 30 minutes, probably - methodically grabbing the letters out of the water and sticking them into the little blue cistern atop her "Bathtime Waterpark." Very entertaining, and she never got frustrated - only a bit mad when I had to keep her from lunging head-first toward the metal faucet in an attempt to catch a letter as it floated away.

I tell you, ESPN should add this kind of programming.