Imagination

The other weekend I was working in our little garden plot in the backyard.  Merry Grace was helping by supervising, Elise had long since gone inside and Ian was playing around the yard.  I noticed Ian had taken two of the riding toys, dragged them down to the end of the driveway, and thrown them into the bushes and tree branches.  After the second time of seeing him do this, I asked what was going on.  "I'm pretending all the bikes are robots," he said, "and that I'm throwing them into poision ivy."  He paused and then added, "And I'm pretending that poision ivy kills them."  I was impressed both by the imagination involved and the amount of actual work his imagination required.  Sure enough, while I plugged away in the garden, he dragged every last one of the riding toys to the "poision ivy," all the while peppering his work with comments like, "Take that robots!"  And around here we have A LOT of riding toys.  I was hoping I could convince him to "free" the robots from the poision ivy, but alas, his imagination did not extend there.  In my experience, it seems that imagination is best utilized in destroying things, rather than cleaning them up.  Oh well.