Our local diner, Lou’s, hands out Wikisticks (you can see them in the picture below) to kids to play with while they wait for their food. Wyatt asked me to help him make a house and two people. Rory looked at Wyatt’s house, handed me her sticks, and said:
C’you make my China?
I said ok, and while I made her a house, she worked with some sticks. That me, she said of a blue circle with two legs. Look! I made me!
She took the house happily, and said, C’you make Baba Mike? (That was her foster dad in China, and her point of reference for all things involving the family she lived with in China.)
I made her a person (mine had arms, lucky Mike!). She took it, and said. Now I got make you. Because you got come get me.
Ok, I said, and she messed around with her final stick and said, There. That you. (I was a blue circle, a little wobbly. ) You not got legs.
That’s ok, I said, I’ll come get you anyway.
Then she moved the sticks around for a while, and then breakfast came, and–other than a brief incident in which she dropped a wikistick and mystified the people next to us by crawling under the table shouting, Where my leg? Where my leg?, that was the end of it.
Seemed healthy to me.