THE SWAMP MONSTER

"I'm the terrible swamp monster," says the terrible swamp monster, in her terrible swamp monster voice. "I've eaten your sweatpea, and now I'm going to cover you with swamp gust."

The swamp is the bubbling section of the OSU recreation pool, an impressive facility that includes four waterspouts of varying magnitude, a slide, a basketball hoop, and a 12-foot diameter whirlpool with a strong vortex current. Family hours are Saturday noon - 5 and Sunday 2-5, and we try to make it every weekend on one day or the other. "Swamp monster" is one of our regular games, and covering me with "swamp gust" (as best I can guess, Ellie has neologized this term from a combination of "dust" and "disgusting") means splashing me with bubbling water as though burying me under mud.

"Help, help," I say, in pseudo-terror.

"I'm not really a bad swamp monster," she continues, in what still sounds like a bad swamp monster voice. "I'm kind of an in-between swamp monster; sometimes I'm bad and sometimes I'm good. Right now I'm bad, but if you go to sleep, when you wake up I'll be good."

I go to sleep. I wake up, yawning, "Ah, I feel much better now." "Here's your eggs and bacon!" says the swamp monster, in a charming, but still identifiably swamp-monsterish, tone.

Ellie hasn't mastered swim strokes -- in fact, she doesn't use her arms much while swimming at all -- but when she kicks along with her swim-fins underwater she shows the natural ease and grace of the skindivers you see in dolphin videos. We recently bought her a set of dive rings, small rings that sink to the bottom (about 3'6" in the rec pool), and Ellie has the agility and the breath to pick up all four on a single dive if they aren't too far apart. She also likes throwing them as far as she can in different directions and telling me to go collect them.

With her swim-fins on, Ellie can move almost as fast as I can unless I have room to break out into a proper freestyle; within the confines of the rec pool I can't easily get away from her. I am therefore easy prey for the swamp monster, who sometimes drags me to her lair, and sometimes just rides on my back. And sometimes she takes me out of her lair to "Quark Park" (another part of the rec pool that stands in for her favorite regular outing from the fall in Princeton), then orders me back to the swamp to take a nap.

Ellie turned five on May 19. Confirming our long-standing rule of thumb that any kid Ellie's size is a year older, her pediatrician informed us that, at 46", Ellie is the height of an average American six-and-a-half year old. At 50 pounds, she is beyond what I am willing to carry, though she can still cajole Lisa into carrying her for short distances. She is confident, imaginative, assertive, agile, fast, talkative, and, frequently, funny. She has learned to tie her shoes, which seems to her, and to us, like a remarkable achievement, demanding a combination of 3-d spatial awareness, mastery of an algorithm, and fine muscle control. If Ellie could tolerate frustration, then she could easily learn to ride her bike without training wheels, but we have decided to wait a bit longer before jumping this hurdle.

Now that Ellie is five, we are beginning to feel that she should be able to do some more things for herself, and that we shouldn't be always and immediately at her beck and call. Needless to say, Ellie doesn't agree. Our disputes on these matters are mostly tedious, but occasionally amusing, e.g.: Ellie asks me to go upstairs and bring down her stuffed bears. I say that she can go do it, or that I'll do it when I am going up for something else. Ellie asks Lisa, who gives a similar answer --- "You're five now, and you have to do more things for yourself." Ellie answers, in a mostly serious tone: "If you won't get the bears for me, then I won't wheel you around when you're old."

Ellie doesn't read yet, but she is much more interested in letters and words than she used to be. She can usually figure out what letter a spoken word starts with if she sets her mind to it, and we play this game fairly frequently. She has recently taken to filling whole pages with letters, mostly a jumble but with the occasional word that pops out by accident or by design. She often refers to this activity as "writing a paper" or "doing my work." Over the month we have spent in Paris, her drawings have become quite a bit more articulated and interesting, including some that are deliberately abstract (as opposed to scrawls) and others that are recognizably specific representations of her toys or characters from movies or TV, even a rendition from memory of John Lennon in his Yellow Submarine outfit (see below).

Ellie doesn't strike me as mathematically inclined, but she has gone from being entirely uninterested in numbers to being mildly interested, and she is beginning to get the idea behind, say, three and three makes six. She has counted to 50 or so on a few occasions. When the pediatrician drew letters and numbers for her to identify, Ellie got them all until 10, at which point she announced that "I don't do two numbers." However, some of her animals have aged into multiple digits --- for a couple of weeks she was telling us that King Kong was 100 and Bearsie was 99, then just as Bearsie made it to 100 King Kong became 101, maintaining his lead. Her recently purchased, plush triceratops is 150. Occasionally we tell her that something (a city, a building, a fossil) is really old, and she will say "Yeah, it's like a-hundred-and-sixty-a-hundred."

Our bedtime chapter books since the last update have been Nicholas; The Borrowers; A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears; No Flying in the House; Homer Price; The Twits; The Phantom Tollbooth; Paddington at Work; A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears (again); Tut, Tut; The Great Piratical Rumbustification; The Blue Moose; Charlotte's Web (another re-read); the last 1/3 of The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle (which we had started back in Princeton); Knights of the Kitchen Table; Beezus and Ramona; The Mouse and His Child; Knight's Castle; The BFG; The End of the Beginning; and Pippi Longstocking. The Phantom Tollbooth was one of my all time favorites when I was growing up --- it was the second chapter book I read to myself, and I think I read it five times during elementary school. Since it's full of puns and mathematical jokes, I knew it was a bit old for Ellie, but I couldn't resist any longer, and even though much of it went over her head she enjoyed the fantastical tale and the great illustrations, by Jules Feiffer. I had never heard of A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, written and illustrated by Feiffer, before I came across it in a bookstore, but I think it's wonderful. Ellie liked most of these books, with Barrel of Laughs perhaps coming in tops, but I think she was most fascinated by The Twits, a short Roald Dahl book about a horrible man and his horrible wife who play horrible tricks on each other.

After two years in the pre-school classroom at the A. Sophie Rogers Lab School, Ellie will start kindergarten in August. We spent a few months fretting over the various possibilities: the "alternative" public elementary school, the French immersion public school, the convenient (but Catholic) Montessori school, other private schools, or moving to a suburb with higher property taxes and a school district to match. In the end, we settled on The Wellington School, a private school ("independent" is the favored term) about 20 minutes from our house. We feel somewhat guilty about abandoning the public school system without even trying it, but Wellington does seem like a perfect match to Ellie. In addition to what look like solid academics, there are weekly swimming pool visits, lots of athletics in general, and French starting in kindergarten. Theater begins in the early grades, and given Ellie's dramatic flair and stentorian voice, this seems like it could become a major interest. More generally, Wellington presents itself as a school that nurtures and values individuality, recognizing many different ways to be a "successful" student. Our one point of dissatisfaction with the Lab School is our sense that the teachers have a fairly specific idea of what a proper 3, 4, or 5 year old should be, and consider departures from that norm something to worry about. The Wellington headmaster's speech on individuality was therefore an effective sales pitch. Many aspects of Wellington remind me of Sidwell Friends, the terrific school that I attended from 7th grade through 12th. That's a high standard for comparison, but if Wellington gets 2/3 of the way there we will be happy with our choice. Ellie herself seems reasonably excited by the prospect, though the discovery that in kindergarten you DON'T get to make all your own choices may come as a shock to her.

As the swamp monster story illustrates, Ellie's imaginings are getting steadily more elaborate, and more unpredictable. For example:

While Ellie and I are swinging on the front porch, she announces:
"Bearsie's sick today."
"Oh dear, what's the matter with him?"
"Well, he touched a poisonous snake."
"Uh oh."
"And he touched the snake because Apple [blue stuffed dog] told him to. Then Apple told him not to, but it was too late because he had already touched it."
"Is he going to be all right? Has he been to the doctor?"
"Yes, he's been to the doctor. He had surgery where the snake bit him. But he's been sick for a long time."

In the bedroom, which is presently a spaceship, she warns me:
"Whatever you do, don't touch this box, and ESPECIALLY don't open the box, because it will EXPLODE. Last time I opened the box, it exploded. It says `exploding blocks' on the side, but I didn't pay any attention to it because I knew I couldn't read!"

In the park, she tells me that:
"One I brought Lion to school, and while we were out on the playground William did something. And Lion went right up to him and said 'Look me in the eye, Boy!'[*] And William did, and then Lion roared really loud. All the kids got scared and they RAN, and at first they couldn't find the gate, and then they did, and they all ran into the building, even the teachers. Then it was just me and William and Lion, and we were locked in the playground."
[* This is the hallmark phrase of Old Spuds, a schoolteacher in our current bedtime book, 'Nicholas, Again']

Climbing on the elaborate "Sept ans et plus" jungle gym at the "Ducko Playground" in Jardin du Luxembourg:
"Everyone in Paris is watching my movie!"
"Oh? What's the movie about?"
"Ellie climbing. That's what it's called, Ellie Climbing."
Ellie ducks through a pipe and over a rope bridge.
"I'm a famous climber."
Ellie ducks through another pipe and disappears from view.
A moment later she reappears, now on the ground.
"Oh no! I fell out of my movie!"
"You fell out of your movie? How did that happen?"
"I don't know. I slid down a pole, and there was a shock, and then I fell back into real life!"

In attempting to expand the overlap between Ellie's musical tastes and mine, I have been focusing on the Beatles. One of our CDs is "1," a compilation of all 27 (!) of the Beatles' songs that hit #1 in Britain or the U.S. In the car, Ellie steadfastly insisted that she hated the Beatles and didn't want to listen to it. In an inspired move, I borrowed "The Yellow Submarine" on videotape from the library. It was a long time before I could persuade Ellie to watch it, but once we finally started she became fascinated with it: the psychedelic animation, the bizarre creatures, the surreal environments and events, and the heroic tale of John, Paul, George, and Ringo conquering the Blue Meanies with music.

Ellie became fairly obsessed with The Yellow Submarine, watching it several times a week. To my surprise, her favorite song in the film, at least at first, was the melancholy "Eleanor Rigby," which Ellie usually calls by the name "How to Get Over Lonely People." (The actual verse is "Aaaa, look at all the lonely people"). We bought the Yellow Submarine CD, and Ellie now knows many of the songs well enough to sing them a capella, with all of the right rhythms and interjections ("ALL toGE therNOW - Alltogethernow"). She does an impressive 5-year-old's version of the Beatles' Liverpool accent, which comes through strongly in her renditions of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and the discordant "Northern Song" (which is virtually unsingable, but Ellie does pretty well with it nonetheless).

In continuing proof of the maxim that one can buy anything on the internet, Lisa found a complete set of plastic John, Paul, George, and Ringo dolls (dressed in their Yellow Submarine outfits), which came complete with the head Blue Meanie, the head Blue Meanie's terrible Flying Glove, the Nowhere Man, and the Yellow Submarine itself. The Beatles and their companions have been to school, to Stauf's, to Northstar Cafe, and to most of our other regular haunts, to the amusement of all our friends who are old enough to recognize them. John seems to generally be Ellie's favorite, though (she says) Paul and Ringo have the best last names.

The Yellow Submarine and the Beatles have brought up complicated issues of fiction, reality, and mortality, all tracing back to the seemingly straightforward question "Are the Beatles real?" A fictional film starring cartoon renditions of a real band who aren't still a band and only some of whom are still alive and who in the film set out on a quest to rescue the fictional Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band who look exactly like the Beatles ... it takes a lot of explaining. By now Ellie seems to have it mostly sorted out. She knows that John Lennon is dead, because when your five-year-old asks you "is John still alive?" what can you answer except "no, a crazy person shot him, and it was very sad." The moral of this sad story, we explain, is that guns are bad, and, especially, that crazy people shouldn't have guns. Ellie's version of the moral, which she stated with great seriousness and emphasis, is "You should get to know someone before you shoot them." (We are pretty sure that "before" here is meant in the sense of "instead of.")

Death has become a returning topic of conversation with Ellie over the last couple of months. She isn't obsessed with it, but she is trying to figure it out and to decide how anxious she should be about it. Several of our bedtime books have involved time-traveling children visiting ancient Egypt or medieval England, mixing fictional characters with real or possibly real (and thus dead or possibly dead) figures from the distant past ... Hatshepsut, King Arthur, King John, Robin Hood, etc. Ellie has learned about graves and burial as a result of quizzing us about the Eleanor Rigby lyrics ("Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried along with her name ... Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave ...") She regularly asks which one of us is going to live longer (or, sometimes, who is going to die first), to which we always answer that we are all three going to live for a long time. In one conversation, Lisa mentioned that women tend to live longer than men, and Ellie frequently informs me of this fact in a tone that is half-pitying and half-triumphal. She sometimes tells us matter-of-factly that one of her animals has died. However, the impact of death in these cases is generally temporary, and the return to life is announced sometimes with joy --- "Hooray, he's alive again!" --- sometimes with mere correction --- "Actually, he's not dead after all" --- and sometimes with mock pedagogy --- "He CAN'T die, he's only a TOY." At 99, Bearsie seems like he could be close to the end, except that, we're told, "Bears live forever."

If the Beatles have contributed to Ellie's understanding of mortality, the fact that we still listen to their music, watch their movies, and play with their plastic replicas has given Ellie some inkling of immortality as well. The following conversation took place in our bedroom, after Ellie had tied ribbons, scarf-like, around the necks of her purple bear (Snickerdoodle) and her white polar bear (Snow).

Ellie: "A long time ago, Snickerdoodle and Snow used to be really famous. They wrote songs and they sang songs."
Pause.
Ellie: "And they were famous. But now they aren't alive any more."
Lisa (or maybe me): "They aren't alive any more?"
Ellie: "No, they just make toys of them."
Pause.
Ellie: "But you see the ribbons? Those are to show that they were really famous."