Pretend play

[Raggamuffin]

Ahh swings. When I get my house I'm going to get a swing put in the garden. I want a proper one like you get in a playground though - the legs encased in concrete and buried under the grass etc. Mainly because of childhood experiences. We had a metal swing set which had 2 swings and then this strange sit on boat style thing which also did the same movement.

The issue with this playset was that it was secured to the ground with long tent pegs - which is fine for toddlers playing about, but when I got older I wanted to swing more aggressively. In fact, when I used to want to swing high the legs of this frame would start lighting up and down out of the ground. There were several times when my momentum had the whole frame tip over. Thankfully I never got hurt, but it was an amazing feeling of mischief and feeling like a stunt man.

There's nothing quite like that feel you get in your chest as you swing. I always did it to an extreme where I literally couldn't go any higher in either direction without gravity making me regret my bravado.

I did want to make a swingers joke, but no - I shall refrain from being crass...for now.

Ed

 

[Sarah S]

Also, have an opossum - you deserve it.

Ed

Believe it or not i actually had said opossum (2 of them male & female) Lovley animals. (heart )

Added of course they were both captive bread and not from nature as i have never had nor will i ever have animals from nature.

 

[Suzette]

Thank you everyone! I do feel better. As always in the early a.m. my mind is full of questions and ideas. Your comments have inspired many more but my coffee is more compelling at the moment.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

When I was 8 we moved 3 times in one year. My mother decided that I was too old for my toys and gave them away. I was inconsolable!

We Moms make such big mistakes when our children are young! I did the same to my daughter when she was twelve. I threw away all her Barbies, because we were downsizing and I thought she was too old and she wouldn't want them anyway. She was so very devastated, and to this day, I feel awful about it.

Looking back, I remember my parents threw away my Barbies when I was about eleven. And I still miss some of those dolls.

My daughter and I had so much fun though when she had her dolls. I had bought her a Thor action figure and when she was about nine, she used to like to make the other dolls play pranks on him. Like she'd pretend Thor would be sleeping and the other dolls would sneak up and dress him up in ballgowns and put lipstick on him. She was such a silly little girl!

Oh how my daughter and I used to play so many games together with her dolls. I feel so bad for getting rid of them.

So now we go to Fred Meyer and look at the Barbie section all the time. I never buy any, because at this point, she admits she's too old. But we look at the new styles and kind of reminisce. Sometimes we make fun of the more ridiculous looking dolls or we play little pretend games.

One style of Barbie that we are just in love with is the new "Barbie Extra". Have you seen those? They're practically collector quality and they are dressed amazingly. They come in all kinds of body types too.

Here are a few examples:

Spoiler

My personal favorite is the second from the left, with the iridescent skirt. I think she's so pretty.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

And yes, I was a very imaginative child. I'm still very imaginative. Sometimes aspies actually have the biggest imaginations of all.

 

[Mary Terry]

@Suzette - I don't know if your style of play is consistent with autism but it is consistent with my NT style of play. I liked to dress up although I was a tomboy, never liked the tea party scenario, and loved my Barbie dolls and troll dolls. I don't remember acting out "social engagements" with them but spent most of my time making places for them to live, decorating the places, sewing clothes for them (my mother taught me to use a thread and needle when I was about 6 y/o). I loved to take the dolls down to the creek and make elaborate tree houses in bushes and other places for them to camp on green moss next to the creek so they could swim, and collected acorns, seeds, flower pods and other tiny plants for their food.

My mother told me when I was 12 years old that I was too old to play with dolls and took them away. I was heartbroken and now view her as ignorant about children's need to play.

I also pretended that I was an Indian (Native American) a lot, playing in the woods, making huts and shelters with tree limbs, leaves and moss, eating tough old stale rye bread as my jerky, making small fires to heat water and make tea. One of the greatest disappointments in my life was when my mother told me in the fourth grade that I could not grow up to be an Indian. It was my life aspiration at that time.

I think there is tremendous diversity among both ND and NT children about how they play.

 

[Suzette]

@Yeshuasdaughter, I haven't looked at Barbies in a while. But part of my collection as a child was a "Growing up Skipper". Barbies teen sister had breasts that would grow when you rotated her arm. It would be worth a fortune today because they made them for a very short time.

The Little Barbie that grew Breasts

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

@Yeshuasdaughter, I haven't looked at Barbies in a while. But part of my collection as a child was a "Growing up Skipper". Barbies teen sister had breasts that would grow when you rotated her arm. It would be worth a fortune today because they made them for a very short time.

The Little Barbie that grew Breasts

I DO NOT remember that one! OMG I can't believe it! Maybe it came out around the same time as the old Judy Blume book "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret."

 

[Suzette]

I DO NOT remember that one! OMG I can't believe it! Maybe it came out around the same time as the old Judy Blume book "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret."

The doll came out in 1975. Weird, I just realized I was given the doll and it was taken away in less than a year.

 

[Au Naturel]

I played with dolls until my early teens. Upstairs in my room and far away from anyone else.

Don't tell anyone. It's a secret.

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

I played with dolls until my early teens. Upstairs in my room and far away from anyone else.

Don't tell anyone. It's a secret.

I still do that. It used to be with Barbies but ever since the Lol Surprise OMG dolls were released, I keep buying them as their skin tones, hair textures and clothing and accessories are much better than Barbie’s. I’m talking really long micro braids that cover the entire scalp, clothes that have patterns and prints that go all the way to the back and not halfway, and chocolate skin toned dolls. And the fabric isn’t extremely thin like a lot of the more recent Barbie’s and has more variety. I was trying to get all of them but there are so many now and the collector dolls would sell out too quickly in stores and the one wave I don’t have had a doll with an outfit that I consider to be an extremely ugly looking fashion disaster. The sad thing is the doll is really pretty but her outfit is so ugly looking that not even a drag queen would bother looking at it and trying it on if it was on the rack in a store!

 

[Matthias]

Most of my neighbors have autistic symptoms. It's seems to become more common every year. A diagnosis of ASD just means you have more symptoms or more severe symptoms than most people. Therapy can help regardless of whether you meet the criteria for a diagnosis.

 

[Gracey]

One year my grandad made me a three storey dolls' house from wood.
It was decorated & furnished and included a family of little plastic bendy people.
The symmetry was exquisite. The tessellation of various coverings to represent outer brick or wallpaper & flooring was mesmerising.
The brass hinges allowing the front of house, front door and roof to open were the best invention I'd seen to date, at the time.
The family of bendy people were essentially a wire core encased in a polymer to enable different positioning of limbs, ie bend at the knee to represent walking, seated position and so on.
Once bent, I was never able to straighten the figures out and stand them upright again. They'd fall over.

What my family saw - Me 'playing' with a dolls house for great lengths of time.

What was actually happening was a lot of repetition (open & closing) and much lining up, arranging and straightening of tiny furniture, ie, dining room table equidistant from supporting walls and at right angles inside flooring pattern. Chairs carefully aligned to table.
Each room had the furniture organised in a similar way.

My curious younger brother played with the bendy family inside the house once while I was out and left it all in dis array.
My world fell apart

I did have teddies and dolls but I taught them (just like my teacher at school) or read stories to them,
rather than cuddled them.

I read a lot when I was young enough to be clueless about what was fact and what was fiction.
It was all real to me at the time.
I believe my imagination grew from reading everything available and picturing or asking for explanation of what the words meant.
(No internet back in the day)