We Play - Beyond the story

At the moment, my big girls are deeply in love with Trixie Belden. (I wrote about their literary love affair here).

Reading the books together is only the beginning of the journey, though a wonderfully enjoyable one. My girls have been taking the elements of the Trixie stories and extending them into long and elaborate imaginative games; the 7-year-old playing Honey, the 5-year-old Trixie, and they usually co-opt the 19 month old to be the cute but troublesome little brother of the books, Bobby.


"Bobby!" they'll say. "Come along here and let's take Reddy to visit Regan!"

The toddler usually plays along, happy to be pulled into secret spaces and part of the sister patter, but occasionally her more literal mind will get the better of her.

"Nooooo," she declaimed on the day these photos were taken. "Not Bobb-eee, me Lulu! 'im no Weddy, 'im Babble!" she asserted, pointing at our elderly and long-suffering dog, Basil, who was being co-opted to play Reddy, the dog of the stories.

"Your name isn't Lulu, you know," the 7-year-old pointed out. "Your name is C-. We just call you Lulu because you are our pet lamb."

The toddler giggled at this and ran off, leaving Honey and Trixie to excavate a secret cave, liberate a kidnapped poodle, discover gold, and capture an international gang of art thieves that had stolen - gasp! - the paintings produced by their grandfather that grace our walls.