![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerYears ago, at Christmas, my in-laws wrapped up a remote-control electronic mouse as a gift to the cats. It had a joystick (which didn't work very well) to let this large, gray plastic mouse with a cartoon face whiz along the floor. The box showed a cat chasing it. Naturally, the cats took one horrified look and ran for their lives. There are things that look kind of like a mouse to a cat, but huge chunk of plastic on wheels -- no.
So I find it really fascinating to watch the toddler mind figuring this stuff out.
Molly has some socks with pink flamingos on them. As we were leaving Molly's preschool yesterday, Kiera saw a yard with pink plastic flamingos, and pointed them out. (She calls them Me-Mangos.) I did spot a black and white picture of a flamingo and Kiera was not able to identify it, so my guess is that she's cued in large part by the color.
Although, she also found an old swim diaper of hers that was decorated with cartoony multi-colored dinosaurs, which she identified as dina-whores. We don't live in a particularly dino-intensive house. (I know some two-year-olds would doubtless be able to tell a triceratops from a stegosaurus, but Kiera does not have the proper sort of older sibling for that.) She does like a book called Ten Little Dinosaurs (in which a series of dinosaur species are killed off by jumping on a bed, riding a bike in traffic, sliding down lava tubes, etc.) but the pictures are very different (cartoony, but in a very different style) from the dinos on her swim diaper.
There are occasional total misfires, like the time we were looking at the petting zoo at the apple orchard. The last animal was a llama. I asked Kiera if she knew what it was, and then joking asked her, "Is it a bunny?" (We have a book where they show you a kitten, a puppy, and a lamb, asking each time, "Is that a bunny?" The bunny, which is the same bunny from the Pat The Bunny book, shows up at the end.) Kiera's eyes went wide and she said, with total conviction, "Yeah!" She then insisted that the llama was a bunny for the rest of our visit. I suppose it does have those long, stick-up-y ears like the bunny in the book... (And yeah, this one was totally my fault. Bad mother, no biscuit.)
So I find it really fascinating to watch the toddler mind figuring this stuff out.
Molly has some socks with pink flamingos on them. As we were leaving Molly's preschool yesterday, Kiera saw a yard with pink plastic flamingos, and pointed them out. (She calls them Me-Mangos.) I did spot a black and white picture of a flamingo and Kiera was not able to identify it, so my guess is that she's cued in large part by the color.
Although, she also found an old swim diaper of hers that was decorated with cartoony multi-colored dinosaurs, which she identified as dina-whores. We don't live in a particularly dino-intensive house. (I know some two-year-olds would doubtless be able to tell a triceratops from a stegosaurus, but Kiera does not have the proper sort of older sibling for that.) She does like a book called Ten Little Dinosaurs (in which a series of dinosaur species are killed off by jumping on a bed, riding a bike in traffic, sliding down lava tubes, etc.) but the pictures are very different (cartoony, but in a very different style) from the dinos on her swim diaper.
There are occasional total misfires, like the time we were looking at the petting zoo at the apple orchard. The last animal was a llama. I asked Kiera if she knew what it was, and then joking asked her, "Is it a bunny?" (We have a book where they show you a kitten, a puppy, and a lamb, asking each time, "Is that a bunny?" The bunny, which is the same bunny from the Pat The Bunny book, shows up at the end.) Kiera's eyes went wide and she said, with total conviction, "Yeah!" She then insisted that the llama was a bunny for the rest of our visit. I suppose it does have those long, stick-up-y ears like the bunny in the book... (And yeah, this one was totally my fault. Bad mother, no biscuit.)
