Sydney has been obsessed with babies lately. She never fails to point out the door to the infant room when I drop her off at school. And last weekend, we had two babies at our house: Baby Clark and Baby Ellie. Sydney really took a liking to Baby Ellie. At one point, I was holding both of them on my lap and Ellie laid her head on Sydney's shoulder. Sydney LOVED it! She had a huge grin on her face.
Today when we got home from school, I was laying on the couch icing my ankle (long story), and Sydney wandered over to one of the baskets where we store her stuffed animals and started rooting around in it. I asked her what she was looking for and she said, "Baby!" I was a little surprised because she has never been interested in playing with dolls before. I helped her find her mini Cabbage Patch kid and her Glow Worm. She decided that the Glow Worm made the appropriate baby and brought it back to the couch to sit with me.
Sydney laid down across my lap and I asked her if she were my baby. She replied, "Yeah!" so I rocked her like a baby. Then I rocked the Glow Worm. Then Sydney took a turn rocking the Glow Worm. Then Sydney pointed at the Glow Worm and said, "Crying!" I said, "Is your baby crying? Maybe she's hungry." We were snacking on pretzels, so Syd fed a pretzel to her baby. Then she decided that the baby wanted to play on the slide and put her down it a few times. Then she suddenly picked up her baby and looked up the back of her shirt (the Glow Worm is wearing only a top and no bottoms) and said, "Uh-oh! Poop!" I said, "Did your baby poop? You'd better change her diaper!" She went and got a diaper and I put it on the Glow Worm, although the diaper was really bigger than the doll.
By the end of the evening, all three of us - me, Sydney, and Sydney's baby - were laying in my bed, with the Glow Worm wearing a diaper and swaddled in a dish towel. I have never seen Sydney use her imagination to play like that before.