Rescue!

Shay's play has recently become much more interactive, creative, and imaginative -- really fun to watch and participate in.  He has always liked to have company when he plays, but for a long time it was just "Mommy, sit here!" and I'd sit beside him and he'd drive some trucks around.  In the past few weeks, though, he has been using the diggers to dig up legos and the wooden trees from his Thomas the Train set and some plastic Easter eggs, and then transferring them to a dump truck, or arranging them in the play garage. And, if I'm lucky, he'll let me have one of the lesser diggers and help him.  

He has also been staging crashes with his trains and trucks -- the train cars will all "fall" off the tracks, and Shay will yell out, "Oh no! Crash!" -- or a series of trucks will "crash," ending up lined up neatly in a row on their backs.  I wasn't sure if this was creative or just destructive, but today things got more interesting: I looked at a row of little "crashed" cars, and said, "Oh no, they crashed! Who will rescue the drivers? The ambulance, maybe?" and pointed to his toy ambulance.  "No, eh-yi-copter!" he replied, grabbing the helicopter and trailing it through the air.  "Eh-yi-copter flying through the air! Rescue trucks!" He carefully tapped the helicopter on each truck, and once a truck had been tapped he turned it over onto its wheels.  Then he toppled all the trucks again and handed me the helicopter.  "Mommy, rescue, " he instructed me. 

We played crash and rescue for most of the afternoon. 

And I was thinking that this age, almost two-and-a-half, with all its communication and creativity and imagination and joy in little things, this is my favorite age so far.  And then I was nursing Maggie, and I smiled down at her and smoothed her soft hair, and she came unlatched because she was smiling up at me, and so then she was lying in my arms and smiling and there was milk dripping out of her mouth, and I thought, THIS, this is my favorite age. 

Then, later, I cleaned poop out of someone's belly button and someone else handed me a booger, and I thought, these ages really aren't all they're cracked up to be.