Let's make cookies!

I managed to get a few in the oven before all the dough mysteriously disappeared.

Call me Nigel

For the last few months Henry and I have been engaged in this extended imaginary scenario in which he is an expert palentologist and I am Nigel, time-traveling dinosaur rescuer. This is not pure imagination on our part; it's the premise behind the show Chased by Dinosaurs/Prehistoric Park, where a dude named Nigel travels back in time to rescue ferocious beasts and lure them back through his time portal to live at Prehistoric Park, his sanctuary for otherwise-extinct animals. I don't remember exactly how I ended up in the role of Nigel, but it stuck. There's just one problem: Nigel is English, so when I'm Nigel I have to affect an English accent and speak in an agitated tone, which I find challenging. And I have to be Nigel a lot. If I forget the game is on and slip into my regular voice, Henry will say, "wait--you're Nigel" and make me repeat what I just said. Henry enjoys it immensely, but let me tell you--my English accent is the worst. Really, really horrible. At best I sound something like John Cleese would if he had a bad cold and a concussion, and was imitating an Australian accent. It's brutal. The funny thing is that Tom is really good at doing foreign accents and could really go to town on this game. But I'm Nigel and he's not, so I must struggle on while he laughs at the way I butcher the role. Henry, obviously, thinks my faux-English accent is just dandy.

Besides the annoyance of having to speak in an accent I find awkward to use, the Nigel game is lots of fun for us. It's pretty much shaping all of Henry's imaginative play scenarios when I'm around. Even though it's based on a TV show, we've really made it our own. Today Henry decided that we would need a Shark Car with fins instead of wheels to complete our mission, so he drew up his idea and we then pretended to build it before heading underwater to rescue a sea monster. I wrap in some educational elements, too. One thing we do a lot is draw a map together with different areas of terrain where our target could be found. Then I'll write up a series of equations for Henry to solve (he can add, subtract and do simple multiplications with the help of a counting abacus). We use those numbers to create coordinates that pinpoint our target location on the map. Then, off we go!

This game creates so many funny moments for me to enjoy and just marvel at the inventiveness of Henry's overactive brain. For example, yesterday he decided that Mr. Pooples, his penguin huggy, should come along on the mission. When I asked him what good a penguin would be on a dinosaur rescue mission, he thought for a moment and came up with three things:

1. He could use his sharp beak to chip through hard rocks during fossil digs
2. He could carefully place band-aids on wounded dinosaurs with his flippers
3. He could use the claws on his feet to scratch itchy dinosaurs, since a dino like therizinosaurus would probably get hurt if he tried to itch himself with his long, sharp claws.

So there you have it--three jobs for a stuffed penguin to complete while on a time-traveling dinosaur rescue mission. After all, we wouldn't want to bring back an itchy therizinosaurus, would we?