Toclat or strawbewwy?

Just a quick funny anecdote.

So William has gotten really into "pretend." I mean, he loveslovesloves to make believe, especially if it involves one of his favorite things on earth: food. He loves to pretend that he's making pumpkin pie. He mixes it up in an invisible pie pan, puts it in a theoretical oven, and then he'll come over and pretend to serve me a piece of pie from a (real) coaster.

He's also gotten into this game where he pretends to bring me a birthday cake, too. He brings me an imaginary cake, tells me what flavor it is, then sings the Happy Birthday song, and then immediately leans over and blows out the candles. And then he does it all over again, except with a different flavor of cake. We must have gone through, oh, 20 or 30 cakes yesterday before dinner. Toclat (chocolate), strawbewwy (strawberry), wemon (lemon), and booberry (blueberry) are the officially sanctioned choices of cake, just so you know. There apparently is No Such Thing as imaginary caramel cake. Or imaginary raspberry cake. Believe me. I tried. One can only eat so many imaginary toclat and strawbewwy cakes.

And he loves to hand out make-believe ice cream cones. Usually, he'll give you three or four ice cream cones in a sitting. And he varies the flavors so you don't get bored. You might get toclat one time, and then strawbewwy the next. And if you can hang in there, you might even get vwanella (vanilla) or wemon. He's very good at sharing when it comes to invisible ice cream cones.

So the other day in the car, he pretended to hand me something. Assuming that it was yet another pretend ice cream cone, I put my hand back to meet his hand, then lifted my hand toward my mouth. Pretending (see, I can do this too!) it was a big ice cream cone, I took a big pretend lick and said, "Mmmm, yummy."

Silence for one beat. Then William pipes up from the backseat. "No, Mommy, that a mouse!"

And then because I guess he was concerned that I was really going to eat the mouse, he added urgently, "Hand him back to me!"

Here you go, kiddo.