I'm watching my Best Friend's child with her grandparents. Things are going normally until she has to share the television. Grandma wanted to watch something and O the affront to this little girl's sensibilities!
I get an idea to go rake the leaves in the yard and make them into as big a pile as her backyard's leaf litter will currently allow. The Child is watching me through the sliding glass door, still obviously upset.
As the leaf pile grew, I started gesturing to her frowny face to come outside but she would ignore me which was not exactly a problem as there were still quite a lot of leaves to organize.
Finally, she came outside but was still visibly upset because I refused to put on Ruby & Max for her so that her grandma could watch something she had been wanting to see. At first, she was mad, irrationally yelling at me through tears to "put the leaves back." She wanted me to unrake them which is about as silly as it sounds but then I don't pretend to fathom the intricate workings of a 4½ year old brain and calmly told her that I couldn't do that.
After a few more plaintive attempts to get me to put the leaves back, she grabbed an armful of leaves and dumped them on a cleared portion of grass. I was in no way mad at her for doing this as interacting with the leaf pile was the plan all along. Instead, I got cartoonishly mad, wildly gesturing while using a silly-sounding "angry" voice that The Child was ruining my leaf pile! Why? WHY??? would she undo all my haaaard work?!! After a few armfuls, I started picking up individual leaves and making quite the overacted announcement that I was adding this leaf to the pile!
At first she was annoyed but after maybe two or three of these announcements (and following through on them), she started giggling. I had her! Now to convince her to play in the leaf pile instead of trying to destroy it.
With some encouragement to jump into the leaves by doing so first, she joined me and to no one's shock but her own...she liked it! Now I play-chased her around with the intent of "getting her" and she did what I hoped she'd do...she hid in the leaf pile to which I would get all confused about where she had gone (I was unsuccessful in getting her to say, "Nobody here but us leaves!" as I exaggeratedly wondered aloud where she could possibly have gone), pretending I couldn't see her in her leaf camouflage.
When she had grown tired of our silly games, she played on her slide/swing set (it had been a while since I had last pushed her on a swing). I then got the idea to rake up more leaves into the front of her slide. She wanted to help this time so I let her have the rake so she could clumsily try to do what I had been doing but, from my perspective, with a comically oversized rake (it was made for adults after all). She was all-in now with the outdoor fun.
Eventually she let me have the rake back after some full-hearted attempts to rake & scoop leaves and I got a decent-sized pile going in front of her slide, covering part of the end as well so she'd just barrel on into the leaf pile.
Unfortunately our time together was at an end but coincidentally she wanted to go inside so playtime ended exactly when it needed to. Childhood Rite of Passage unlocked: played in a leaf pile :-)
