How DOES Your Child Benefit From Play?

As I was looking around for something totally unrelated, I stumbled across an article about exactly how playing benefits a child, and it also has suggestions for parents/caregivers to maximize the potential in play time.
It's been really fun to watch Erik and Paisley play, both together and separately. Erik is just starting to show signs of pretend play, which is so exciting (and dang cute) to watch. Paisley is fascinated with everything around her, and loves the fact that she can crawl over to anything she wants and check it out. We're getting lots of social interaction/training as we learn not to take toys away from each other and how to deal with it when someone else is playing with something you want (we've got a long ways to go in this department!). It's so fun to watch these two showing off their new skills as they play, I love to be able to see them figure out something they couldn't do the day before.

Gotta love the winters here. This was taken in December :)