We back out of the garage at 7:52. Ellie has two strips of bacon with her in the back seat, since she usually likes to bring some of her breakfast with her in the car. At the long traffic light near school, I hand Ellie her toothbrush and swallowable toothpaste. It's Thursday, so she has her swimsuit on under her uniform (khaki pants, blue polo shirt, white tennis shoes) and an okapi in her tote bag for show-and-tell. We review her her three show-and-tell clues: he has stripes, he has a brown body, there's one in the Columbus Zoo. I don't think they'll guess this one.
We park in the lot at 8:07 and head in to school, cutting through the impressively stocked Wellington library to circumnavigate the upper school morning assembly. Ellie stops at the drinking fountain at the end of the middle school hall, then it's down the stairs to the lower school. We hang Ellie's tote bag and jacket on her hook and head in to the classroom. "Good morning, Ellie," says Mrs. Lewis, and Ellie replies "good morning" after I give her a small nudge. Ellie goes over to her best friend Sarah, who stands up from the picture she has been working on, gives Ellie a hug, and comes over to watch while Ellie writes her name on the sign-in sheet, which displays the full range of kindergarten handwriting skills. Fourteen festooned, construction-paper turkeys are clothespinned to a string that hangs from one side of the classroom to the other. (In previous weeks it's been apples, fall leaf collages, jack-o-lanterns, etc.) I lift Ellie up so that she can scan across the line and pick out hers for me to admire. On the "I am thankful for ..." line taped to the bottom, Ellie has written "mY tRcE." I give her a kiss, put her down, go through our standard high-five goodbye ritual ("Up high, on the side, down low ... too slow"), and head to work.
Kindergarten starts at 8:15, and by aiming to arrive at 8:05 we manage to hit the 8:10-8:13 window with surprising regularity and precision. School runs until 3:25, and Ellie then goes to After Care, where she plays outside, draws, does puzzles, watches movies, plays games, and hangs out with other lower schoolers (and some adults). Lisa usually picks her up between 5:15 and 5:30 --- a long day, though when it was still light and warm Ellie would often want to stay on the playground for another half hour before leaving. She sometimes falls asleep in the car on the way home, and even if she doesn't she may be in near-sleep grogginess when she comes in the house. "Hey sweetie, how was your day?" "Good." The right set of leading questions over the next 10 minutes may evoke a few more details, about what happened in music class, French, gym, or art, or about show-and-tell or the bi-weekly outing to swim class or gymnastics, or the field trip to the apple orchard or the food market. However, in the mildest foreshadowing of adolescence, Ellie will sometimes respond to all questions with "I'm not going to tell you." Or, better yet, "Well there was that little problem." "What problem was that?" "I don't want to talk about it."
Ellie's tote bag comes home with the book she has checked out from the library (kindergartners get to have one at a time), and maybe her ring words (file cards on a ring with words she is trying to learn by sight) and a drawing or two. On Fridays she brings home a folder with a week's worth of worksheets, collages, and illustrated stories, and the weekly kindergarten newsletter with a list of the books they have read in class, the songs they have sung, the letters they are working on handwriting, the progress in ABAB patterns and counting by tens, the numbers of seeds in the three classroom pumpkins, and the "enduring understandings" that are goals of the current few weeks ("Letters have sounds and can be put together to form words," "We are part of a community," "All living things grow and change.") The transition from a pre-school with a play-based curriculum to a kindergarten with an "academic" curriculum, combined with being five and being ready for it, has produced four months of cognitive explosion. The most interesting and important parts involve reading and writing, which I'll say more about below. But it's also a charge to have Ellie come home knowing stuff we had no idea she knew, whether it's the flags of Saudi Arabia and Poland, French vocabulary, or what a Pilgrim is (the 1620 kind, not the more abstract concept). "I KNOW that," she sometimes responds when we attempt to explain something to her, with her voice carrying slight tinges of pride, annoyance, and condescension.
The few weeks that preceded kindergarten featured a high incidence of full scale tantrums, complete with door-slamming, screaming, angry gestures, and uncontrollable sobbing over what seemed to be the tiniest of frustrations (like a drawing that didn't come out as well as Ellie wanted it to). We recognized this as a symptom of hidden anxiety over changing schools and "growing up," but it was wearing nonetheless, and it left us approaching the start of school with some trepidation.
In the event, the transition was amazingly easy. At the end of day one, Ellie declared "It was great. I love it." The big fascination of the first week turned out to be the girls' bathroom. When Lisa came to pick up on the first afternoon, Ellie insisted on showing her BOTH the girls' bathroom in the aftercare building and the girls' bathroom down the hall from her classroom. On the third morning, Mrs. Lewis told me quietly that Ellie was asking to go the bathroom A LOT, and in case she complained that she wasn't always allowed to go, then I should know that she was getting to go as much as she needed. We found Ellie's obsession amusing, but decided on reflection that it was no surprise. One way or another, toilets were a big part of life through four years of day care/pre-school, and they were always an annex of the classroom, mixed boys and girls, open stalls, and not far from adult supervision. So the combination of girls-only, stalls with doors, and, above all, being able to go down the hall BY HERSELF to the bathroom must have seemed an awesome transition towards grown-uphood.
While Ellie is generally enthusiastic about kindergarten, her friends, and her teachers, she does drop tidbits about quarrels, or pushing on the playground, or her difficulty in sitting still and keeping quiet when she is supposed to be sitting still and keeping quiet. The fact that Ellie is, in her words, "always getting into trouble," clearly frustrates her, even though (or maybe because) she recognizes that she has no one to blame but herself. The "star award" --- a laminated piece of blue construction paper with a yellow star on it --- goes home each day with the kid who has been best behaved (or perhaps just the one who has most exceeded expectations). "It's so hard to get the star award," Ellie explained to us. "Mrs. Lewis has to not have to speak to you ALL DAY." When Ellie did, at last, bring home the star award for the first time, she was beaming. Once with all three of us in the car Ellie recounted an afternoon of being separated from one friend and then another. "It sounds like you need to control yourself better," Lisa and I advised. "I want to, but I can't," Ellie replied in a tone of despairing resignation. "I lost the remote."
At our first parent-teacher conference, we reported Ellie's perception that she was getting into trouble all the time. Mrs. Lewis looked bemused by this comment, but after a thoughtful pause she conceded "I can see why she might think that." She then reassured us that Ellie's behavior is well within the normal kindergarten range, and that neither she nor we should be anxious about it. This was what we expected, but it still came as a bit of a relief. "Ellie's a hoot," she said. "She's one of the kids I know I'll still rememember a decade from now." For our part, we are thoroughly impressed by Wellington and by all of Ellie's teachers, especially Mrs. Lewis, who manages to seem genuinely delighted and energized to see her 14 five- and six-year-olds show up EVERY morning.
The acquisition of written language is a less astonishing process than the acquisition of speech --- after all, you can actually explain to the kid how it is supposed to work --- but it's another gigantic step in life, mostly slow, but with some sudden transitions along the way. For more than half a year, Ellie has been able to figure out the first letter of a word from its sound. She has been getting steadily better at this, and more recently she has been able to work the process backwards and guess a word based on its first letter given some contextual clues. But despite months of our sounding out words phonetically with her, it didn't seem to click --- she could say the sounds letter-by-letter, but for her they remained isolated sounds too far separated to flow into a word. And then, one day, it DID click, while Ellie was playing a computer game (from a great reading website called "Starfall") that involved matching written words to pictures. "Ke, Aa, Nuh ... Can! Buh, Aa, Tuh ... Bat!" and on to the next level, "Kuh, Luh, Aa, Puh ... Clap!" Now that it has clicked, Ellie enjoys the puzzle of sounding words out, and we mostly intervene just to resolve the ambiguities of vowel pronunciation ("Ay, Aa, Ah, Uh") or to remind her of combination rules ("when S and H go for a walk together, what sound does it make?"). Ellie clams up if she gets tired or has trouble with a difficult word or just thinks we're being too pushy, but she can usually make it all the way through the (very) short "homework" books that come with her from school. Some words and syllables are beginning to move from puzzle-it-out to recognize-on-sight, setting the stage for fluid sentence reading and polysyllabics.
Ellie is also learning to reverse-engineer her phonetic reading skills and convert sounds to letters, albeit inventively. Mrs. Lewis encourages her kindergartners to venture bravely into spelling, and we frequently get worksheets or drawings with Ellie's writing and a parenthetical translation penned by Mrs. Lewis or the classroom aide, Miss Linton. Visual context sometimes makes the translation unnecessary --- mY tRcE is bound to be "my turkey" --- but when the drawing and spelling are both ambiguous it helps to have it (bRD = "bread", aCloD = "a cloud"). Now that Ellie can write upper case and lower case letters, she adds visual texture to her print by employing them evenhandedly. Both Ellie's spelling and our efforts to help her with reading have reminded me that consonants are much more straightforward than vowels, which change sound so much depending on their surroundings that they seem quite untrustworthy.
Ellie has always enjoyed drawing, but she has become much more dedicated to it in recent months. She will sometimes settle in with markers and a pad of paper and churn out drawings for half an hour or more. Drawing has edged out reading books as her preferred activity when we go out for breakfast or for dinner; occasionally, Lisa and I even get to converse! Most of Ellie's works come in series. The largest of these series (numbering in the hundreds, I think) is "John Lennon, Ellie, and Roly-Poly Olie [a robot-like cartoon character who is one of her favorites from French television] crossing Abbey Road, along with the number 10 and [letters] b and d holding hands." Next largest is the cow series, in which Ellie traces a cow drawn by Lisa, then adds grass, the sun, and (sometimes) Ellie milking the cow. This series was initiated during our visit to Passfield in August, when Ellie saw lots of (real) cows. There are variants of this series with different animals: horse, sheep, hippo, elephant. Another important variant is the ill cow, covered in tiny spots, wearing a multi-colored blanket, with a thermometer in its mouth (sometimes a parent has to draw the thermometer, since it is the hazardous, mercury-filled kind). There is the butterfly series, usually with one wing decorated in pointillist dots and the other in Cezannesque wedges of color. Now that Ellie has mastered the spiral and the antenna, snails appear frequently, as do bugs, aliens, penguins, fish, and airplanes (the last three can be hard to tell apart). One recent style of drawing is densely covered with different groups of figures, with each group (snails, penguins, fish, etc.) surrounded by a square frame, which Ellie usually identifies as an aquarium. Ellie's attention to details in her drawings is steadily growing --- a snowman, for example, has dots instead of a line to show his mouth because it is made of acorns or charcoal, and his "fingers" are jagged because they are twigs on a branch. She is also much more precise in drawing something she has in front of her, such as portraying one of her toys or replicating a book's cover illustration. However, layout is still rather haphazard, with little advance planning. Ellie recently started a picture of five dinosaurs by drawing the five mouths, which made it hard to squeeze in the five bodies surrounding them.
The narratives accompanying the drawings are also getting more complex, though unless you sit with Ellie while she is drawing you don't usually get the full story. I recently watched while Ellie revisited an old theme, a ladybug eating aphids. "This aphid," just below the ladybug's reaching foot, "doesn't know he's in danger!" Then, after adding another ladybug to the drawing, "He doesn't know how to get out of check." Impressed by the chess reference, I ask Ellie what it means for an aphid to be in check. "When he's about to be grabben and he can't get out of the way, that's check. 'Cause if he goes that way, then THIS ladybug will jump over him, and he'll still be in check." "And what does that mean?" I ask, thinking maybe Ellie will come up with "checkmate." "It means the ladybug gets to have him for LUNCH."
The drawing gets steadily busier, with more aphids, and more ladybugs blocking the paths of other ladybugs. "This ladybug's trying to sneak in. And then they all start pulling, so of course the aphid comes apart into lots of pieces, and then they all get to have some." Feeling slightly ill, I stop asking questions.
Our bedtime books since the last update have been Ramona the Pest; The Borrowers Afield: Nicholas, Again; Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle; The Boxcar Children; Titus Rules OK; six books from the Magic Treehouse series read in three different stints; Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH; Ramona the Brave; Toys Go Out; Stone Fox; Mary Poppins; A Stranger at Green Knowe; Mush, Dog from Space; Ozma of Oz; Seven Day Magic; The Hundred Dresses; and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. The best of these was Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Cleary, told from the point of view of a spirited, determined, and not very obedient kindergartner. It captures the inner life of a five-year-old very believably, and at times movingly, and I felt as though I gained new insight into Ellie's experience of her world by reading it. Ramona the Brave is set a year further along, and either Ramona-the-first-grader is less vitally realized than Ramona-the-kindergartner or Ellie and I just aren't engaged by six-year-old concerns yet. I enjoyed re-reading Mrs. Frisby and Ozma, both of which I remember as childhood favorites. I found Mary Poppins, which I had never read, quite fascinating, much more intriguingly surreal and less fussily Edwardian than I had expected. Ellie liked all three, probably Ozma the most.
In September we finally got around to doing something we should have done four years ago, the last bits of paperwork to formally "re-adopt" Ellie in Ohio, allowing us to get her an Ohio birth certificate and to legally change her name. Now even the U.S. Passport Service and the Social Security Bureau can know her as Elena Rui Florman Weinberg, instead of Rui Yang Li. The final step of this procedure was a short hearing at the Franklin County Probate Court. We explained to Ellie a couple of times in the preceding week what this was about, and in particular that we would meet with a magistrate and he or she would ask us questions about our family. On the appointed morning we went downtown to the courthouse, through the metal detectors, through the marble-lined lobby, and up the elevators to the 22nd floor. After a few minutes going over the last few forms, someone let us into the courtroom. We had the place to ourselves, and Ellie looked around, taking in the big tables and chairs and the raised dais with the judge's rather imposing desk.
Lisa told Ellie that the magistrate would be there in a few minutes.
"How big will he be?" Ellie asked.
"Well -- " Lisa skipped a beat as she processed the question,
"I think he'll be normal size. About like Daddy."
Our magistrate was, indeed, normal size, and friendly and informal. He treated the occasion with just the level of moderate seriousness that it needed. We raised our right hands and swore or affirmed that we would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I stated my name and where I lived and who I lived with. Lisa stated her name and confirmed the accuracy of my account. Then the magistrate asked Ellie if she wanted to say anything. Rising to the occasion, she said quietly but smoothly, "My name is Ellie, I live with my mother and father, and I'm very happy there." The judge smiled and asked her if she had rehearsed that, but Lisa and I were both laughing ... because she hadn't!
Ellie has if anything increased her talent for what could charitably be called "spontaneous narration" (and could uncharitably be called "drivel"). She will launch into garrulous free speech whenever she is in an energetic mood and there is someone to hear --- preferably to listen and to fill whatever roles are assigned, but to hear is sufficient. She flips back and forth between fiction and non-fiction, though the former dominates, and her storylines often draw on whatever movies and books are presently at the top of her mind. For example, she likes to run around the kitchen on all fours, casting herself as Remy the rat from Ratatouille and directing us (cast as other characters from the same movie) to chase her or defend her or help her cook. On our recent 7-hour drive to Virginia, Ellie watched her DVD player for two hours and chattered away the rest. Her narratives are filled with direct and indirect quotations from videos, faux French accents, stock characters such as "evil magicians" and "your old lobster friend" (we still have no idea where that one came from), dinosaurs and fierce animals, medical emergencies, and many, many references to underpants, posteriors, flatulence, and other bodily functions. They are also filled with repetition, and they are sometimes very loud.
One of Ellie's favorite generic insults is "you pompous old windbag," quoted from an elephant in The Jungle Book and delivered with pitch-perfect intonation. "Do you know what a pompous old windbag is?" her Grandma Sue asked her the other day. "No," Ellie admitted. Sue explained: "It's someone who talks and talks but doesn't know what they are talking about." Ellie paused, and thought, and reached the obvious conclusion. "I guess that means I'm a pompous old windbag!"