Work it

As a parent, it's important to me that you understand that my daughter, the Hatchling, is the cutest, most adorable person in the world. Fact.

Yesterday evening she spent about an hour walking around the house "photographing" us and her toys. Her camera was in fact a large rectangular piece of Lego. She would come up to us and say, "pictures?", in her best air-hostess voice. She would then hold the Lego up in front of her eyes for several seconds and say, "smile!", before turning the Lego around and offering us a view of the beautiful picture she had just taken.

She took quite a few shots of us before moving on to her toys. They were photographed in situ, individually, before she realised the exciting artistic possibilities open to her, and she began arranging the toys in little tableaux, usually with the toys having their arms thrown casually over one another's shoulders as if they were just coming home from a night at the pub.

She was halfway through one particularly detailed shoot when she stopped, peered closely at the piece of Lego, and must have decided that it made a better airplane than camera, because she started saying, "zoom zoom zoom!", and flew it around the room several times.

That didn't last long though because it then became apparent that Baby (her doll, who has no hair) needed her hair brushed, and the airplane/camera was the perfect tool for the job. She was quite vigorous in her brushing and because I'd missed the plane-brush transition I thought that she was brutally beating Baby with an airplane. As a result she got a little lecture from me about how its very important to be kind and gentle to babies and thus beating them with vehicles of any kind was really not on.

She looked pretty baffled, but had the patience to explain to me that the plane was in fact a brush. So it was all okay. But I think my intervention kind of ruined it for her because the camera/plane/brush went back to being a camera shortly thereafter and remained so for the rest of the evening.

Smile!