His House had a Toilet

Alright, I know I have a tonne to do here. There are pictures to upload for yesterday’s aquarium visit post (done!). There’s the focus group on Friday, the second half of the Stanley Park visit, aaaaand now Car Free Day from today.

But before I touch any of that I just have to share with you Cameron’s latest adventures in that blurry ground between imagination and reality.

He loves to make houses out of cushions. He’ll pile them in odd arrangements in the middle of the living room sometimes, in the living room door other times, and sometimes on or around the comfy chair. So when we were slow getting under way today, and I was heading for the shower, that’s what he started doing. He nattered on happily about building walls and a door, and how the space behind the chair (a triangle of space just big enough for him to sit down in) was his basement. I heard something about his house having a toilet, but didn’t think much of it.

As I got out of the tub, Cameron bounced into the bathroom, blue eyes sparkling with excitement and pride. “My house has a toilet!” It took me a moment, but eventually I figured … hhheeeeeyyyy … maybe I should check this out. “Tell me you didn’t make a toilet for your house,” I asked, on the way, and he dutifully told me what I’d asked to hear. When I saw what he’d made, my first question was, “But you just use it for pretend, right?” He nodded, and said, “Oh yes, just pretend.”

In case you’re not sure what you’re looking at, this is his toilet, of course. It’s a kid-sized oxygen mask from our ER adventure last week, and the tube that goes with it. The yellow cheese block is a wooden toy with springs in those holes, and there are wooden torpedo shaped mice to fit in the holes.

Inside the holes he has stuffed Kleenex, instead of the mice.

And yes. The Kleenex in one hole is wet. Yes, there is yellow liquid in the tubes. And yes, there is pee on the cushions, but nowhere near as much as I would’ve expected.

You gotta admit, it’s pretty clever. How he went from, “I breathe in this,” to “I pee in this,” I’ll never understand.

I’m now starting to look on all of his pretend play with some wariness. Was this a boundary-of-pretend issue? Or an engineer’s pride?  All the same, when he started talking about how he was building a home for wood bugs out of building blocks, I was very quick to make it perfectly clear, “Cameron. No wood bugs in our house. Not even to get to their house. No wood bugs in our house.”