pretend games

For the last few months, Liesl has asked to play the same pretend game every morning after we drop Sebastian off at school. As we are walking back home, she runs ahead of me and sits on the curb (or squats, if it's wet), and directs me to "pretend like you don't see me... you're just talking on your phone...".

The game is that she's Anna, or Elsa.  It depends on how hold she wants to be that day, and it can range from being a baby to being 10 years old.  My dialogue has been prescribed in advance, and alterations are really not encouraged.  So I pretend to stumble over her sitting on the street and say, "Why, hello little girl. Why are you sitting here? Where is your family?"

And then she gets to launch into her story, which is usually a variation on a theme: her parents have left her behind and are dead.  Sometimes they have drowned in a boat - which is obviously the story from the Frozen movie, but lately has morphed into going down with the Titanic (thanks to Sebastian's fascination with that disaster). Other days, it turns out that they were eaten by a bear - the family was hiking together and she stopped to tie her shoe/look at something, and they left her behind, not realizing she wasn't with them. Regardless, they're gone, they're not coming back, and somehow, miraculously, they left a note for her - this is a part I've been skeptical of - they wrote a note as the ship was sinking? As the bear was chasing them? How did it get sent?

But moving on, it turns out that she has no other family or friends, and has been sitting on the curb/in the forest for days without food, and so she's cold and hungry and thus has to come home with me, a perfect stranger.  When we come back into the house I have to exclaim to Steve: "I found a little girl outside, and she's come home with me!"  And so we move on to part two of the dialogue/story, in which she gets to ask me about myself and my family, and tell me about herself - her age, her baby sister - and by the way did I know, she's a princess?! Who can shoot ice from her hands and make magic? And once she shot ice at her sister's head, but it was a mistake, she didn't mean to....

Sometimes, the game ends there, but other times we continue playing, pretending various things - I'm taking her in my magic sleigh (the car) to a special playground (her preschool) or to stay with some very special friends of my daughter's (the Delloways, who are occasionally kings and queens and princes themselves). Sometimes other magic creatures chase our chariot, or we have to escape from bad guys, or sometimes she's just in our regular car going to join my daughter at her preschool for the day.

I don't entirely understand what she is practicing or learning with this game, and why she is so insistent on playing it every day. In the beginning, it made me very nervous: you know you aren't really supposed to go home with strangers, right???  But now I just wonder at the endless repetition, and wonder what she's working through with this particular storyline.