The author's doctoral work involved relating abilities in play to the results of a developmental assessment. She found them to be highly correlated, which should have made her happy. Instead she was troubled by the results. The skills that children use in play are important. Given materials that appeal to them and that "pull for" the desired skill and sufficient time, children will always show the abilities that are readily available to them (they may or may not show the best they are capable of doing). A growing literature suggests that observing play with objects can provide a window on cognitive development. Nonetheless, two traps lie in wait for unsuspecting practitioners who assume the mantle of the progress rhetoric, reducing play to skills. First, there is a danger that they may attempt to improve cognitive skills by teaching children to "play" with objects in a more mature way. There is little, if any, evidence that such is possible. The second trap is the one the author fell into: Assuming that because an assessment took place in the context of play, it was an assessment of the "experience" of play. In addition to the progress rhetoric, Sutton-Smith (1997) described the "rhetoric of the self," which is very much like "play as occupation." This rhetoric is what the author "assumed" she was employing in her doctoral research. She subsequently embraced it in the "Test of Playfulness" (ToP) in which she defined play as intrinsically motivated, internally controlled, and free of unnecessary constraints of reality. Although she has not tested this proposition, she doubts that scores on the ToP correlate strongly with scores on a test of cognitive ability; the two constructs do not share much in common. She knows, however, that ToP scores correlate with scores of coping; both share a common thread, flexibility. The moral of this story, then, is that assessments serve as operational definitions of the constructs under study. Like play, many constructs of interest to pediatric therapists are complex. Therefore, it behooves them to carefully and actively select the definition they intend to address.