Friends, real and imaginary

Samson has a lot of friends. I bring this up because you would think (or at least, I would) that in making up names for his toys, he'd pick from the list of children he knows. Between friends he's known all his life (literally) like Jacob and Oliver to kids he's met at school this year, like Jordan, there should be no shortage of names.

Even so, almost every toy gets named either Bedai [pronounced BEE-dye] or Dai-dai [pronounced DYE-DYE].

Full disclosure: I'm guessing here on the spelling, but I feel like going with the "ai" at the end gives them a kind of Old Testament meets Kung-Fu sensibility. Plus, that's how I see them in my head when he says them. [Am I the only one who sees words in his head when they're spoken?]

Any attempt to get him to see the difficulty in having a whole society of toys with the same two names seems to fall on deaf ears. Yesterday, his Playmobil plane took off for Congo [no, I'm not kidding] with five passengers, four of whom were named Bedai. The fifth was Gog, which apparently still resonates somewhere in that swirling little mind of his.

Speaking of planes, we've started playing a game where we spot a plane in the sky and try to figure out where it's going. Lately, all flights seem headed for Congo, with an occasional flight bound for Australia and a rare one headed to "my school."