Aina

Alice has an imaginary friend. Sort of. Her name is Aina (pronounced A-nuh). She is all things, all ages, owns everything, and has experienced many, many exciting and terrifying situations in her short lifespan. She dies every other day. Alice has talked about Aina for a long time. As far as I can tell, Aina is not a "real" person in Alice's life. Alice doesn't see her and talk to her as if she were physically present. It's more like Alice tells stories about her.

I can only illustrate this through examples:

Alice perches on her seat, interested in something she's doing at the kitchen table. She loses her balance, tips in the chair, and scrambles to remain standing. She smiles and says, "I kept my balance! I didn't fall!" I cheer for her, we celebrate, and she climbs back onto the chair. Then she turns to me and says, "You know, Aina fell off her chair once."

"Oh really?"

"Yah. And she got a big bonk. She had to go to the hospital ("hos-i-puhl")."

Another time, we were talking about visiting family far away and Alice shared, "You know? Aina lives in Utah. You have to take 5 airplanes to get there."

Conversations about her upcoming birthday party prompted Alice to say: "Aina invited me to her 8 birthday party! She got baptized."

So, I figure Aina is the one who experiences all the things Alice wants (and doesn't want) to experience. It's a way for her to think about possibilities without putting herself in that imaginary situation, which can be super scary for an almost 4-year-old. Aina is a safe thought experiment.

When Alice is tired and a bit grumpy or sad, sometimes she'll say she's sad because Aina has died. Sometimes "she dies only a little" and sometimes "she dies forever", depending on how sad Alice is feeling at the moment.

Recently, Alice was playing at the Family History Center while I was trying to check in some films and she drew one of her cute little self portraits. She gave it to me to "keep forever" (translation: don't throw it in the recycle pile when we get home, okay Mom?). Then she drew a picture of Aina. This is the first time I've ever seen Aina:

 

Alice tells me those are freckles on her cheeks and a bellybutton under her smile. She looks like a pleasant sort of girl, happy and strong despite her periodic misfortunes :)