Toys

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I also had my fair share of toys, but I never had any problems knowing how to play with them.

The toys I had were plushies, cars, dolls, action figures (He-Man figures mostly), animal figures, Star Wars figures, Playmobil, My Little Pony, and lots more.

I played with my toys, and I also played with playing card and some board games that had boards suitable for play, like The enchanted forest, Pongo, Nancy Drew, Ronja and Emil.

With the games, the backgrounds on the boards would be used as scenes for stories my figures went through.

For the most part my plushies, cars, dolls and figures went to daycare and school, had outings, played sports (I must have been the only kid to play sports with my toys (which was fun) rather than actually playing sports (which wasn't)!). They went on adventures, and had fun and exciting times, and they also had lots of interactions, and bickered and fought as well.

I played out scenes from real life and made up imaginary events.
My plushies even went to school when I was in my first 3 grades, and among other things they read out loud, where I mimicked kids in class and how they read, and when I mimicked one boy in particular I would scold the plushie in question, saying it was misbehaving by not reading properly; that was due to me thinking that boy was misbehaving by doing that, being unable to understand that he wasn't capable of reading better.

I did have Legos, but I thought building things was boring and hard. I lacked the patience for it (and most jigsaws). My father actually built a great Lego city that I played with quite a lot. I had it in a drawer thing under my bed and pulled it out when I wanted to play with it so it was ready assembled.

I never had any problems making up games for pretend play on my own.


The less usual scenarios were the "typical autistic" way of playing.

On occasion I could turn a car on its back in my hand, and I would spin the wheels until all 4 were spinning. I wasn't allowed to watch it (according to my own rules) until I managed to get all 4 spinning, only then did I deserve to watch them spin until they stopped, even though I could only really watch one wheel. Just the same, I had to deserve it.
I would do that on occasion only, and only a few times before it got boring and I played my typical way again.

I also had my own version of lining up toys.
With my plushies, I would play on the bed with my favorites. The bed was an ocean, my duvet was a raft, the pillow land, and the side of the bed a dangerous water fall. I had to save my toys from drowning and I always got the least favorite first and so on until I just barely managed to save the last one, my favorite, just in the nick of time. And then they'd be lined up in order of how I liked them.
With my cars they parked on parking spaces on a plastic road and scenery map mat I had, also in order of how much I liked them, They were taking refuge in a storm.
I also had a similar game with my favorite color markers.
With my playing cards, the numbers were kids of that age. They were waiting for their parents to come pick them up by car, they'd get in and be off. My favorites (8 because I liked it best, 6 because I was 6, and 2 because my favorite kid in daycare was 2) always had to be the last to be picked up, and I almost smelled the scent of our car when it was finally "my" turn!

I played those games a bit more than the spinning wheels, but once they were lined up, it soon got boring to just look at them, so I played something else then.

I also played sensory games. I would seek out smells, sounds, colors, tastes that I liked. That could be smelling scented markers, playing on sound making toys, pulling out the color markers I liked best, or lick the end of a pencil.
I also sometimes closed my eyes and rubbed on them, enjoying the patterns and colors.

I always loved books. Before I could read, I looked at the illustrations, and I was a bookworm from the moments I could read on my own.

And of course I daydreamed a lot.