Isn't imagination great?

I'll never forget the first time a fork was made into a gun in our house, I'm pretty sure Joshua wasn't even 2 at the time.

Yesterday we did beading to keep the kids busy and quiet while Jeff slept in, and Anna wanted her beads around her neck as a necklace, but Abigail said hers were a fishing line, and proceeded to go fishing.

One of Joshua's favourite things with the cooking set is to get out the plastic lids I have collected for maths counters and set them up just so to be "jellies". The blocks, beads and pirate coins all get used as food when they're pretending to cook as well.

The mini Jenga blocks get used as building blocks more often than we play Jenga.

We have a Wallabies flag which has never flown but which makes a fantastic cape for Rescue Man.

Shoelaces seem to be very useful in our house as well. Sometimes the kids wash their clothes under the tap outside and need their own washing line. Sometimes Joshua wants to rig up a complicated hanging door knocker for the boys' bedroom. Sometimes Anna wants to take her pet Abigail :-) for a walk. Until I had kids I did not know shoelaces could be nearly so versatile.

But the one thing which continually amazes me with its apparently limitless uses? It's sand. Plain old dig-it-up-from-the-sandpit sand. Sometimes it makes cakes, sometimes it makes castles, sometimes it makes crowns - although the littler kids tend to protest when the bigger ones hold "coronations". Sand hides dinosaur fossils, is great for dig-dig-digging (of course) and is really useful when you need a desert island to visit in your pirate ship so you can bury some treasure (or dig some up). Talk about multi-purpose plaything!

This post was inspired by Mrs Edwards, at Veritas at Home, who has just written two posts on her kids' Off-Label Imaginations.