Shef is going through a developmental stage where he doesn’t understand scale. His Little People can go down their slide, he reasons, so he should be able to go down it, too.


Every day, over and over, he straddles the slide.

“Slide!” He says again and again, each time with a bit more urgency. “Down!”

And, each time I patiently and gently explain that the slide is too small, that we have to try it with a Little Person.

“Person!” he agrees, happily. “Slide!” And so, the boy and the girl People each slide, and I naively assume we’ve gotten things figured out.

And then (sigh) we repeat this interaction twenty or thirty more times.

It’s the same with the dollhouse stairs at his friend’s house and with the ramp on the Little People Garage at Aunt Susie’s. It’s one of those things, like many in toddlerhood, that’s cute the first time, and then, after twenty or thirty or two hundred times, not so cute.