Hista mabra barbista histambolico. Brascalantano ibris scadabandara bridoosgitom havanfangulan ga doosenemen birrangolo. Brusscana moose. Hiranbangulam bononoma hagastiman histambolico. Bivouganto bastanamaryo hubrambintolo beese sculanten hagafnan chirousco breesmann boostandang grrlip. Truevanta hoomph. Blimnos. Haffbarabusca.
One day Ellie came home from school speaking "Ellie Language." (Fortunately for us, she continued to speak English as well.) Initially, the syllables sounded mostly Italian -- lots of hard consonants, o's, and a's -- but pronounced with a slightly Spanish accent. At the time, Ellie had never encountered either language beyond the occasional "Dora the Explorer" episode, so this seemed to be her natural bent rather than imitation. The vocabulary and accent of Ellie Language have drifted over the last year, sometimes with recognizable influences, sometimes not. During several weeks when Ellie's video-of-constant-repetition was the beautiful animated film "Azur and Asmar," Ellie Language picked up a noticeable Arabic inflection, which has remained with it even though the video itself has returned to occasional status. Ellie Language has also picked up Eastern European tones. These may be my influence, as Ellie and I sometimes carry on conversations in Ellie Language, and my random babble draws on syllables acquired during my years in the Yale Russian Chorus. Somewhat surprisingly, the pronunciation of Ellie Language shows no traces of French, even though this is the language that Ellie learns at Wellington and encounters each summer in Paris.
It has been 16 months since my last Ellie update, so I have pretty much missed first grade -- we're now halfway into second. I won't try to cover the lost ground systematically, just report a few snippets and highlights. We had some minor anxiety when the first day of first grade approached, but much less than we had with kindergarten, since by then we knew the school and the kids and had some sense of what Ellie was like as a student. As she and Lisa came into the house that first afternoon, I asked Ellie how school was. "Fantastic," she replied. Not a lot of detail, but certainly the description we wanted to hear. There were ups and downs over the ensuing nine months, but in general, first grade was great.
The thing that seemed to make the strongest impression on Ellie the first day was the assignment to remember the name of her assistant gym teacher, Mrs. Rastock. The head gym teacher, Mrs. Fuller, had announced that they would be quizzed on this subject at the next class. We wrote the name out, rehearsed it, and discussed it many times over the next two days. As we drove in to school on the third day, Ellie told me that she had bookmarked Mrs. Rastock's name in her head so that she would remember it, and she explained that these in-head bookmarks (analogous to web sites bookmarked on a computer, apparently) were a generally useful tool for remembering. I asked her what other bookmarks she had set at the moment, and she said that unfortunately the only other ones were "scary nightmares." "Can't you remove them?" I asked. No, she told me, the nightmares themselves installed the bookmarks, "and they're impermanent." We then discussed the difference between impermanent and permanent, but we did not go into the risks of accepting unknown cookies.
Ellie is now in second grade, at Littlebrook Elementary School in Princeton, NJ. Lisa and I are both on sabbatical this year, and we are spending it at the Institute for Advanced Study. We are happily taking advantage of the largesse of Princeton taxpayers -- specifically, their excellent public schools. The foreign language at Littlebrook is Spanish rather than French, so Ellie is pleased to say that she now speaks four languages: English, French, Spanish, and Ellie Language. She tried to claim Arabic as a fifth, but we told her that mastering dialogue and songs from "Azur and Asmar" didn't count, though her accent IS impressively convincing to our untrained ears.
Ellie's explanations of spoken Ellie Language remind me of Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty: a word "means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." Her translations are delivered with complete assurance, but they do not remain consistent from one time to the next. "Histambolico" is one of the most common words in Ellie Language, and at some early stage it was the EL version of Haggis, the name of our 1-year old Scottish terrier. (He also goes by Hagalope, Hagatroid, Hagerman, Hagamonster, Hago, Hagamemnon, and Dickerones. The last is an Ellie invention of unknown origin.) "Histambolico" has been through several transformations of meaning over the last year, and at present it is the EL translation of "the f-word." Knowledge of the (English) f-word -- picked up too easily from her parents, I regret to say -- has burned through Ellie like a nuclear secret. She knows full well that she should keep it to herself, but she can't resist letting others (including her second-grade friends) know that she knows, and then feeling a thrill of guilt. Or mock guilt; we can't always tell the difference, and it's not clear that Ellie can either.
In addition to our conversational lessons, Ellie sometimes tutors us in written EL, which looks something like Arabic and something like scribble. Ellie will write out half a page of this, then hand it to Lisa and instruct her to copy it, exactly. I refuse to participate in this exercise, telling Ellie that I will try to copy it as soon as SHE writes out the same passage a second time. During a recent visit to the Reina Sophia museum in Madrid (I am finishing this update on the plane ride home), Ellie decided that a series of paintings by Leon Ferrari had been written in Ellie Language (Google Image will show you what I mean). She couldn't quite decide whether to be pleased or outraged by this appropriation.
The songs and rhymes and taunts that Ellie brings home from
elementary school are a mix of new inventions and things
that I recall from 40 years ago. While I hadn't thought
about Opposite Day in decades, it flooded back to me as
soon as Ellie reintroduced it. Now that I am an adult,
I recognize its sophisticated, aggressive/transgressive nature.
"I have to do my homework now? Oh I get it, it's Opposite Day
so you mean I DON'T have to do my homework at all."
"I hate you Daddy .... It's Opposite Day!"
"Five plus five is ten? Uh uh, it's Opposite Day, so
you're wrong."
Opposite Day can be declared at a moment's notice;
it is a chance to say the unsayable, and a chance to declare
your parents in error no matter what they say.
Sometimes, Ellie will emphatically state
``It's not Opposite Day,'' which resolves precisely nothing.
Ellie has been a big fan of the "Junie B. Jones" books, told from the perspective of the eponymous kindergartner, and of the continuation series "Junie B., First Grader." While Junie B. is a bit of a caricature, I have to concede that she is a caricature who hits close to the mark. In one book, the central theme is the scary monster under Junie B.'s bed. On the one hand, Ellie can laugh at the book, and she can recognize that Junie's classmates are telling stories just to scare her ("where do you think those drool marks on your pillow come from if it's not a monster?"). On the other hand, Ellie is still worried that there may be monsters in her OWN closet. She is clearly not sure who to side with as Junie B. argues with her parents over whether monsters-under-the-bed are or are not real. Ellie's interest in Junie B. has declined sharply in the last couple of months, perhaps because she is now a second grader and outside the target audience, or perhaps because we have already read them all twice.
Looking a few years into the future, we have all been enjoying the Wayside School books by Louis Sachar, which are clever, surreal, and very funny. Wayside School was built sideways, so though it was designed to be a single story, it is actually 30 stories. Sort of -- Miss Zarves teaches the class on the 19th story, but there is no 19th story, except when there is (in the not-19th chapter). Ellie is just old enough to appreciate this kind of intricate absurdity, though she is still not quite sure what to make of it. Sachar's brilliantly constructed novel Holes, about a teenage detention camp where the inmates spend their days digging holes in the Texas desert, has been one of the highlights of our bedtime reading. Other highlights include:
In her own reading, Ellie is by no means precocious, but she does read with character and tone and accent, even when she is halting her way through the words themselves. I think this talent comes partly from Ellie's natural tendency to performance, but more from the way that Lisa and I read to her, trying to invent distinctive voices for each of the characters. The best of the easy-reader books were Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie stories, where even the monosyllables and 3-word sentences convey, alongside the pictures, a shifting range of moods and relations between the protagonists. Ellie's first pass through Go Dog, Go was a milestone achievement, at least in length. Over the last year, through excellent teaching at Wellington and Littlebrook and moderate pushing from her parents, Ellie has gradually worked her way up: to longer words, to a larger vocabulary of words recognized on sight, to irregular spellings, to reading (sometimes) without the guidance of pictures and with the guidance of punctuation, and to more complex ideas. By now, we are more often surprised by the words that she reads without difficulty -- beautiful, congratulations, giraffe -- than by the words that stop her. However, she tires quickly, and she is still not over the hump of enjoying to read, either to herself or to us. We usually have to make deals: she and Lisa read alternate pages, or she reads the first picture book and we read the others, or she reads the first page of the chapter and we read the rest. We hope that with just a little more practice, reading will get easy enough to be a pleasure rather than a chore, and it will join Ellie's list of default things to do, alongside drawing and rollerblading and watching SpongeBob SquarePants (oy!).
When reading to us, Ellie frequently substitutes a word that fits the context and has the same first letter as the word on the page, even though the rest of the word looks nothing like her choice. While these mistakes sometimes seem like simple laziness, they have made me think more carefully about my own reading mistakes and the degree to which reading, like listening, relies on prediction. My mistakes often involve substituting words with the nearly same meaning as the ones I misread, and they sometimes follow Ellie's track of substituting a word with the same first letter as the printed syllable. Most intriguingly, I find that I sometimes substitute an unrelated word from the next line or the next paragraph, that even as I am reading one sentence I am subconsciously looking ahead to see what happens next. This looking ahead, I now realize, is critical to reading with the right voice or emphasis -- to know who is speaking to whom, and whether the upcoming event requires a dramatic pause or a straightforward continuation. I sometimes get it wrong, of course, and have to repeat a sentence using exactly the same words but opposite intonation. Now that I recognze the complexity of this process, the need to look ahead for clues and to maintain two simultaneous streams of thought, I am much more impressed by Ellie's ability to read with character, especially when she is reading a book she has not read or heard before. I barely understand how I do it myself.
Our favorite all-family reading experience has been the graphic novel series Bone, by Jeff Smith, a nine-volume epic that resembles Lord of the Rings in theme and scope but comes with pictures and humor. We tried out the first volume on a friend's suggestion, not realizing that it would turn into a major financial and temporal investment. We soon settled on distinctive voices for a dozen or so major characters -- some good, some evil, some goofy, and many whose allegiances remained uncertain until the final volumes. All three of us could reproduce these dozen accents when it was our turn to read. If Lisa or I accidentally matched a speech balloon to the wrong character, Ellie would correct us -- "that's the wrong voice!" -- immediately. After finishing the series in July, we had about a one month break, then read the whole thing again.
Bone has also inspired Ellie to write her own graphic novels, which frequently run for 30+ pages (one panel per page), populated by bears, crocodiles, dogs, lions, monkeys, dragons, monsters, and people, complete with speech balloons and interventions like "meanwhile" and "3 days later." Some of them, in imitation of Bone, have extended to multiple volumes. Most of Ellie's stories wind like a forest path; they are coherent for four or five panels in a row, but over longer stretches they meander unpredictably, and you cannot guess from the start where you might end up. However, her most recent effort has used the theme of a treasure map to guide its two main characters through 90 pages, and while it hasn't yet finished, it may yet reach an end that follows from the beginning and the middle.
Ellie is fond of improvised role-playing games, especially if she gets to assign the roles and dictate the action. This is often what she is doing when we pick her up from her after school program, playing with one or two or three other girls, and sometimes a jump rope or hula hoop serving as some kind of prop. (At this age, the role-playing games of girls and boys do not intersect.) When playing with us, she often tells us not just who we are but what we should say, line by line. Her favorite games with us are variants on the theme of "stray kids." Sometimes, she is the child who has been living on the streets for all of her life, and we are to wander by murmuring "Oh, how I wish I had a child," then "Hello little girl, what's your name? What are you doing out here all by yourself?" She tells us her sad life story, and all ends happily ever after. Often her name turns out to be "Elena Rui Florman Weinberg," which makes the outcome seem virtually inevitable. In the other main variant, all three of us are "stray kids," and we confront a variety of obstacles, sometimes just the fact that we haven't had anything to eat in a year, and other times kidnappers or vicious animals or monsters. I am always assigned the name Tommy, which I think is derived from the character in the Pippi Longstocking books/movies. That analogy suggests that Lisa should be named Annika, Tommy's sister, but she is usually just called "Sis." Our ages vary -- sometimes we are all close, but other times one of us is the older sibling charged with protecting the others.
I can imagine that this game sounds rather charming, but we have been through the sequence so many times that it has become pretty tedious. I presume that Ellie is attached to it in part as a way of working through adoption issues, but she never draws that connection explicitly. While she often asks to hear the story of our trip to China, and of our delight at becoming her parents, she generally seems neither distressed nor obsessed about being an adopted child. We have often talked about her "birth mother," and she has now learned enough about reproductive biology to understand what the phrase means. (The question of a "birth father" has not yet arisen, but it may not be far down the line.) We sometimes talk about the puzzles of childhood memory -- like most seven-year-olds, Ellie has only vague recollections of events that happened when she was four and essentially no recollection of earlier events, even though her memory when she was three and four seemed perfectly crisp and detailed over stretches of a year or more. After a couple of these conversations, Ellie has told us "I'm surprised that I can remember what my birth mother looked like." To which we can only respond "So are we."
In Paris this summer, Ellie had the most overqualified in her string of overqualified babysitters -- Jenny Rowe, a recent Yale graduate, now a doctoral student in French literature at Cornell. Ellie loved her, and we are selfishly hoping that she will be back next summer and still in need of supplementary income. As soon as we got back to Columbus, we moved house, from 48 Smith Place to ... 37 Smith Place. While our house had been feeling smaller and smaller over the years that Ellie has been with us (the presents from her seventh birthday party spent weeks on the back staircase because there was nowhere else for them to go), we had been reluctant to move because we like our neighborhood, and we like our neighbors. When the house across the street, nearly twice the floor space of 48 Smith, became available, we decided it was an opportunity we couldn't pass up. Moving to a house 50 yards away was in some ways easier than a conventional move, but it did mean making 537 trips across the street for boxes and odds and ends after the professional movers transferred the big furniture. As soon as we were finally settled, unpacked, repainted, etc., we moved to Princeton for the year. Although Ellie misses her Columbus friends, she is having a good time in Princeton. She likes her school, she likes her after school program even more, and she loves being able to rollerblade around the paved footpaths and low-traffice streets of the IAS housing complex without supervision. At Ellie's urging, I got my own pair of rollerblades, partly because I would really like to be able to rollerblade, and mostly because I thought Ellie would enjoy the experience of being much better than me. She does. I am still hoping to advance from the stay-alive-on-a-flat-surface level to the get-around-smoothly-and-safely level, but I don't ever expect to reach the level of grace and control that Ellie has already achieved.
As Ellie gets older, we get fewer of the unconsciously hilarious statements that have made earlier updates easy to write and amusing to read. Nonetheless, conversations still sometimes take surprising turns.`
Ellie to Lisa: "When are you going to die?"
This may sound like the start of a sombre discussion, but Ellie asks Lisa this question every couple of weeks. She sometimes asks me, too, but that may be out of politeness rather than concern.
Lisa: "Not for a long, long time."
This is the standard answer.
Ellie: "When you go, will you take your computer with you?"
In the context of this particular conversation, the question appears to be motivated by Ellie's wanting to have access to her favorite online computer games when she comes to visit.
Lisa: "I don't know if they have wireless in heaven."
An important point.
Ellie: "Oh sure they do, you're closer to the internet there."