CREATIVE SPELLING

MAMA ILUVYO BECUS URINDLJALT.

As I mentioned in the last update, The Wellington School encourages its kindergartners to venture boldly into writing, and not to hold back for fear of transgressing the boundaries of conventional spelling. This approach is great for Ellie, since she has plenty of opinions and desires to communicate, and it makes writing a natural extension of drawing, which is already one of her favorite activities. She will write on whatever paper is available, but her preferred medium is the Post-It Note, and we find her mini-missives adhering to a variety of locations around the house. There are lots of "MAMA I LUV YO" notes, and even the occasional "DADDY I LUV YO."

In case you couldn't figure out the last word in the opening sentence, the full translation is "Mama, I love you because you're indulgent." At least Ellie knows that she should express her appreciation.

Here are a few of Ellie's other written communications:

TOTHEMAMA THEDADDDY IS STICE

After returning from a run and discovering this note on a Post-It, I hope that the last word can be decoded as some errant form of "nice." However, Lisa informs me that it is "stinky."

DADDY I WUTTO SLEEPIYO BED!

(Daddy I want to sleep in your bed.) Ellie always likes to come into our bed when the opportunity arises. She complains she is scared or lonely or uncomfortable in her bed, arguments that get a more sympathetic hearing from Lisa than from me. When I'm traveling, Lisa often lets her sleep in our bed because it is easier than getting her back to sleep in her room when she wakes up in the middle of the night (which she still does with draining regularity). I am obstinate in not allowing the same liberty, since Ellie kicks and tosses all night, making it unpleasant to share even a queen-size bed with her, and in any event I like to read in bed before going to sleep. During one of Lisa's longer out-of-town trips, Ellie brought up the bed question over and over and over, and she finally resorted to to writing her sentiment on a Post-It and sticking it to my back.

HOM UV THE WINBRGS

Post-it note on the front door. This was subsequently replaced by a larger and more lavishly illustrated paper sign, The Weinberg Family, which lasted for a month before blowing off in a rainstorm.

ILEfDU PRSiT ellie

(I left you a present, Ellie.) Written on an envelope, next to a jump rope. Admittedly, it is still Ellie's jump rope, but it's the thought that counts.

LEAH I LUV YOU YOOR U GD feD

(Leah, I love you, you're a good friend.) Leah has been Ellie's best friend for most of the school year. That's partly because Leah is the other girl from her class who is consistently in AfterCare (Wellington's 3:30-6:00 program that makes life possible for working parents), but it's also because Leah is extremely good natured, and she's willing to join in Ellie's wildness even though it's probably not quite her natural mode. This note was written on a day when they went to the zoo then came over to our house for the afternoon, spending almost the whole day together.

WeR HAVIN U YRD SAL

Through much of the spring, Ellie and Leah were getting together for a playdate about every other weekend. During one of these, they decided to play yard sale in Ellie's room, and Ellie made several signs to post around the house, including one taped to Leah's hat.

DED SNAK[E]

Written in chalk, on the garage door, with a left-pointing arrow underneath. On the way to the garage one weekend morning, Ellie declared "There's a huge pink worm on the sidewalk. It's gross." I went out and saw what at first appeared to be the longest and thickest worm I have ever encountered. Closer examination showed it to be a small snake, lying on his back, displaying a worm-colored underside. He was alive, but not doing well, probably the victim of one of the cats who has taken up residence under our porch, totally contemptuous of our attempts to scare them off with barks, hisses, and yells. I picked the snake up with a stick and tossed him into the bushes. Ellie protested that he was still too close, but we headed off. That afternoon she wrote her warning sign on the garage door. Lisa told her to add the missing silent-e, as even Ellie acknowledged that "dead snack" was not the sentiment she wanted to convey.

Of course, Ellie does writing at school as well, either free form or filling in blanks. The teachers are kind enough to provide notes for the parents when they think we might need them:
'I like' [fill in blank] SLETN (with picture of sledding)
'I can' RLRCAt (rollerskate)
'Yesterday I learned about' RANfoist (rainforest)
IWeTSeNM (I went swimming)
WUN DAiKAM ATSiD AN I FAND U dRAGiN AD MOM WS WREL UBAT ME
(One day I went outside and I found a dragon and Mom was worried about me.)
'On my snow day' I BiTD U SNM (built a snowman)
I am U STONMR (an astronomer)
The valentines we could figure out for ourselves:
MAMA I LUV YOU BECUS U R MY MAMA
I LUV YOU BECS U R U GRADADDY

One evening we had our friends Margaret and Keith over for dinner, together with their four-year-old son Michael. At some point Michael and Ellie disappeared into the next room, where Ellie's toy food, oven, and cooking utensils are. They announced that they were running a restaurant, with Michael the chef and Ellie the waiter. Ellie appeared a couple of minutes later with the menu, boldly labeled RESROT (that's "Restaurant") on the front. Inside, the choices on offer were:
SANWiSH
TMATO
MiC
PESU
FiHS
FRESHFRiS
Fortuntately, like an Asian restaurant catering to American tourists, each option came with a drawing, which helped us decode these as sandwich, tomato, milk, pizza, fish, and french fries.

Getting Ellie interested in reading on her own has been much more challenging. She figures that she doesn't get anything out of reading a book that she wouldn't get out of one of us reading it to her, and neither mastery for its own sake nor mastery for the promise of future pleasure seems to provide much motivation. "Because we say so" doesn't work very well either. Ellie likes to do things she is good at, and she is only occasionally in a mood to plug away at things that are difficult for her, despite our best assurances about how well she is doing. In reading as in sports, games, drawing, and other activities, she has an odd mix of competitiveness and anti-competitiveness -- she wants to be good, but she doesn't want to risk not being good, and she can get extremely frustrated if she isn't doing as well as she thinks she should. This is a tough puzzle that we are trying to crack as best we can.

With spoken language, I can barely understand how it is possible to learn it at all. With reading, on the other hand, I have to remind myself why it is so difficult. My gut feeling is always that reading and writing have basic principles, and that once those principles have been learned it should be straightforward to apply them. Watching Ellie learn has reminded me instead how much reading is a matter of practice, of encountering even the straightforward words or syllables so often that you don't have to figure them out each time, leaving processing power for the polysyllabics and the exceptions. Fortunately, I can refer to my own recent experience of trying to relearn conversational French (not that I was adept at it in the first place). I know that I, too, have the relevant words and rules somewhere in my brain, but I cannot draw them out fast enough or smoothly enough to make it worth someone's while to listen.

Of course, there continue to be lots and lots of pictures as well as writing. We took a delightful trip over spring break to Sanibel Island in Florida. Ellie's spring break "journal" consisted entirely of drawings: kayaking, with a pelican looking down from his perch; bicycling with Ellie on the trail-a-bike; swimming in the pool with Mama on the deck chair; swimming in the ocean with her green boogie board; Ellie and Lisa picking up shells on the beach; Ellie on the balcony of the hotel (she loved going out of the room and re-entering with the key card, over and over and over); a still life with cheeseburger, fries, milkshake, and ketchup bottle from her favorite dining establishment, Cheeburger-Cheeburger; Ellie on a boat trip with a dolphin looping out of water.

We still get a respectable supply of surreal stories. One afternoon, on the drive home from school, Ellie expressed grave concern about her fuzzy blue bear, who had gotten a little wet in the rain.
"He's allergic to water," Ellie explained.
"Oooh, that sounds bad," I replied.
"Yes," she says, "it means that I have to dive in the water and catch fish for him."
"How do you do that?"
"I just dive in and sneak up behind it and 'chomp' with my mouth. And I come back with smoked salmon!"
Bear, she explained, is especially fond of lox. Bear's water allergy apparently caused the flu, so as soon as we got home Ellie hurried upstairs, took his temperature, and put him to bed.

On another drive to school, we were discussing the upcoming Sanibel Island trip, specifically the airplane flight to get there. "Don't forget to pack my Babar bag with lots of things to play with. Because otherwise it would be really boring to just sit there like a half-wit." I chuckle, and assure Ellie that we will bring entertainments.
"Where did you learn the word half-wit?" I ask.
"From Piggy-Bank."
"From Piggy-Bank?"
"When we came back from Paris, I put a Paris coin in him. And he said 'Why did you give me a half-wit?' So I told him it was French money."
"Aaah, I see."
"Then I asked him if I could have my euro coin back, and he popped it right out."

On the physical side, the big development is that Ellie can now ride a bike without training wheels, something she started doing just a week before her sixth birthday. We had carefully warned her that learning to ride without training wheels took practice, that there would be some falls, but that if she kept at it she would master it soon enough. We invested in and installed a special attachment to allow adult stabilization without the back-breaking effort of trying to run with one hand reaching down to a low seat. Then, when Lisa accidentally let go of this device a bit earlier than she had intended, Ellie just went --- no problem, no falls. It has been easy ever since. For her birthday, Ellie got a bigger bike with bigger wheels, on which she can go quite fast. Our longest rides so far have been just over a mile each way; beyond that (or when busy streets are involved), we still go to the trail-a-bike.

Ellie also now knows how to roller skate, the one useful result of spending a week (a week!!) home from school with the flu. For two hours each afternoon, just enough to make return to school untenable, Ellie would get a fever and feel tired. Since we wouldn't let her go out in the cold weather, she spent much of the remaining time just trundling about the ground floor in her roller skates, and by the end of the week she had it down pat. She continues to swim with enthusiasm, and between school, camp, and our regular weekend swims, she gets lots of opportunity. One day I picked up Ellie from a day of "spring break camp," another of those great Wellington features. She told me about the day's outing to the swimming pool, and about jumping (really) off the 10-foot diving board. It hurt her legs when she hit the water, she said, but she did it six or seven times anyway. She also did spinning jumps off of the lower diving board, "but I knew I wasn't old enough to do that off the big diving board."

Our bedtime reading since the last update, at least as recorded by my irregular bookkeeping, has been: Rabbit Hill; many entries from the "Magic Treehouse" series; The Magician's Nephew; From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; several books in the Junie B. Jones and Judy Moody series (elementary schoolers with similar names and similar personalities but different authors); The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane; a mystery titled C Is For Canary; The Railway Children; Poppy; Wet Magic; Danny, The Champion of the World; Ragweed; The Invention of Hugo Cabret; The Magic Finger; The River at Green Knowe; Ginger Pye; Poppy and Rye; and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. "Edward Tulane" is a beautifully told story of a porcelain rabbit's long journey through the world. I feared that "The Railway Children" would have too much air of 'Masterpiece Theatre Junior' about it, but it went over very well. The Poppy series ("Poppy", its prequel "Ragweed", and the first of several sequels "Poppy and Rye"), by the single-name author Avi, appeals to Ellie's natural fondness for plucky mice. (Also in the plucky mouse vein, we tried "Despereaux," by the same author as "Edward Tulane," but we found it too grim to finish). The Narnia books ("The Magician's Nephew" and "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" being the first two) take me back to my own childhood favorites, and they are going over well despite being pitched a bit older.

"The Invention of Hugo Cabret" is the most extraordinary book on the list, a thick volume in which stretches of conventional narration alternate with stretches of beautiful illustrations that carry the action forward until the words return. One of the book's central characters is the early 20th-century filmmaker Georges Melies, and by luck there was a major exhibit on him and his work at the Cinematheque Francaise during our visit to Paris, enabling us to see some of the films that had figured in the story. Ellie's stuffed puppy Buster found several of the films scary, especially the one with the giant at the North Pole, but with Ellie to comfort him he was able to make it through.

Since this was supposed to be a spring update, I will give only the briefest recap of summer. Our usual July in Paris was preceded by a four-day trip to the Italian Alps --- a reunion of five ex-IAS astronomy postdocs and their families, including six children aged 2.5 - 15 with a maximum age gap of three years. The combination of friends, scenery, and enough kids to (largely) entertain each other made for a great vacation. In Paris, Ellie had a terrific baby-sitter, Stephanie, a young American woman engaged to a French man (the first of their two weddings took place in July). After a few days of warmup in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Stephanie managed to take Ellie to a different place every day for four weeks with virtually no repetition. Since Lisa and I were working during the day, we found ourselves feeling slightly envious --- certainly Ellie has now been to many more Parisian parks than we have. Lack of English-speaking kids continues to be a challenge for our Paris summers, though we did have several playdates with Elisa and Paloma (and their parents), who we met at the Luxembourg playground last year and who also maintain a July-in-Paris regimen. Elisa and Paloma are seven and five, respectively, and Ellie and Paloma are decidedly kindred spirits.

The big event since our return has been the arrival of a Scottish Terrier puppy, on August 11, at the age of nine weeks. After a month of discussing names, in the final few days Ellie cycled continuously among the top remaining choices: Otto, Farley, Fergus, Mungo (Scottish for "my wolf"), and Haggis. On August 11, it seemed that the wheel of fortune had stopped on Fergus, but on August 12 it took one final tick, and now he is Haggis. He is a remarkably calm puppy, and willing to put up with Ellie's frequent carrying and occasional veterinary care. ("Gentle, Ellie! GENtle!") Like all puppies, he nips on occasion, hence Ellie's most recent note:
DEAR
HAGGIS
NO BUT
iN i HOP
LAT yOUR
SRE

(Dear Haggis, no biting, I hope you are sorry.)

I am finishing this up during one of our semi-annual family visits to my parents' place in central Virginia. These are enjoyable and mostly relaxed affairs, thanks to the combination of setting and company --- three of Ellie's grandparents and my brother's family, the most important of all being Ellie's cousin Alexi, who is almost exactly the same age. Now that Ellie and Alexi are six, there is a competitive edge to their relationship that wasn't evident in previous years, but they still manage to have fun with each other most of the time. Haggis, meanwhile, has been enjoying the space and the chance to play with his three doggy cousins, the most overwhelming of whom is the golden retriever puppy Shandy, just a week older than Haggis but already three times his weight. The middle cousin, Tigger, is the most willing to indulge Haggis's fantasy that he is, in fact, a powerful and fearsome beast.

This being Summer 2008, Olympics have been a major theme of conversation (together with hope and anxiety about the November election among the adults). As Ellie and I were out at the parallel swings on the nearby tree, she informed me that "Spain has eight and Ukraine has fifteen. And Germany has googleplex." While I did not yet know the rules of the sport we were about to engage in, it seemed that we were well positioned to win the silver medal, until she added "and Effanute has a hundred and fifty." (One always learns so much geography during the Olympics.) Fortunately, after 15 minutes of hanging onto swings and counting, with bonus points credited for self-induced minor injuries, we raised our score to 153. And in what will surely go down as an enduring controversy from the 2008 Games, it turned out that the German team had been sent home before the medal ceremony because they had scored too many points. Ellie and I took the gold.