I convinced Annika to take out all the Playmobil toys we have so we can clean out our basement and maybe organize them a little better. Both kids have loved Playmobils for most of their lives, so we have quite the collection. I told her we could take them out, fill up the little pool so there was an ocean, and make an entire city with the toys outside.

This plan finally convinced her. It will take a lot of work to take out all the toys, so without the payoff of great play, it would have been tough to get her to go along with it. She’s been talking about it all evening. We snuggled down to go to bed and she asked again if we would take out the Playmobils, and I reassured her that we would. Then, she said “and we can play with them.”

I said something like “yeah, you will have fun playing with them!” And she said “you can play too!” I hemmed and hawed a little, and she said “don’t you know how to play Playmobils?”

I mean, I do, I guess. I remember playing with Little People for hours. We had stores and houses and all kind of cars and people. My favorite was the mail carrier truck because it had real mail that you could slip into the openings at each store in the little city we had. I would get lost in my pretend world.

While I like setting up all the little toys and looking at all the cute little pieces, I don’t get into that pretend play like when I was a kid, and I’m kind of wondering why. I think I remember learning that it’s a developmental level where kids get engrossed in pretend play, but I’m not sure why we necessarily stop doing that. It’s kind of like story writing in a way. Do we lose that imagination as adults or do we just use it differently? Maybe because we’re busy doing the living (shopping for groceries, doing the laundry), we don’t have the need to play it out with little people? I don’t know though – The Sims was a pretty popular (and fun) game. Isn’t playing with little people pretty much the same thing?

Regardless, I get bored playing with the little people pretty quickly now. There’s only so much I can have them do, I guess. I can tell Annika gets engrossed in their stories, as did Anders when he was young. That part is fun. I’ll help her get everything together and maybe I’ll try having some “guys” as we call them here.

I kind of miss getting lost in that imaginary world, even if it doesn’t feel like I can do that very well anymore.