So I let my child follow her obsessions, learn what she wants… who am I to say what is Important to learn, that her passions are not valuable, however weird they are.

This is todays hours of work after an epiphany, “I can draw vases of flowers,” that she had at 10:30pm when she wasn’t sleeping, she was trying to stay awake, waiting for me.

There are over 100, she counted. She drew them for hours…

Then she combined vases with another current obsession – set ups. This is an on-going obsession and was recently stimulated by her saving all her birthday money, the money she got paid by a busker to be in a show, pocket money and various bribes for months to purchase a Sylvanian baby bedroom, a Sylvanian Shoe Shop!!! and new Sylvanian twins, “open mouths” to go with her “crawler” “sitter” “mover” and one “just called mousey because I’ve got two sitters”…

These are what she calls “set-ups”. They often contain some hand made elements.

I mostly get the set-ups, (even the “holiday home”), the animals are characters, and she looks after them, talks to them… they have personalities, particular likes and dislikes but sometimes I do find it hard to say what she could be learning, the game doesn’t seem to change much. Then I watch her in the real world where she gets to put this into practice – little kids love her. They learn her name “nana” “hella” “hannana” “hennana” etc. I can’t tell if she’s getting better at these interactions with littlies but I don’t really care when I see our one year old neighbor’s face light up when he sees her.