YESS! UMMM .... WHY?

December, 2004


I had hoped to get out an Ellie update at the end of the summer, covering the six weeks from the end of our Paris trip to the beginning of term at Ohio State. Obviously, I didn't make it, and spare moments during term are hard to come by. So this update covers a long time span, and it may ramble even more than its predecessors.

The end of the summer felt long, relaxed, and pleasant. The weather was good for the most part, allowing lots of visits to playgrounds, the zoo, and so forth. We often invited friends over to eat dinner and help us entertain Ellie for the evening. The days when we actually cooked for our guests seem mostly gone, but we are still capable of ordering pizza or Chinese food, and every now and then we get ambitious enough to grill.

One September evening, Ellie launched into a spirited and entirely unexpected chorus of "AaAY, BeeE, CeeE, EFF, GeeE, Aitch, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Ten." She would repeat this chorus with vigor and enthusiasm ... and consistency, despite our protests that E-for-Ellie was a critical omission and that letters might object to numerical infiltration of their ranks. Ellie's burst of alphabetical enthusiasm proved to be the precursor of a more general outpouring of song lyrics: over the weekend, Ellie produced reasonably accurate, spoken voice renditions of Itsy-Bitsy Spider, Rain Rain Go Away, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Ring Around the Rosy, Old MacDonald, and (thanks to one of her favorite Sesame Street videos) La-Di-Da-Di-Da What's the Name of that Song? She was soon completing the alphabet song with "Q R S T U V W X Y Z" and the traditional "now I know" coda, confirming our guess that "H 9 10 11 10" had somehow emerged from the phonic echoes of "8 9 10" and "L M N". Ellie's modified version of the alphabet song persisted for several weeks, but by now she has the conventional lyrics down pat, and she now sings songs instead of speaking them. She regularly demands that we sing her a song that she knows from day care but we have never heard of, and she gives us a withering look when we plead ignorance. Conversely, she sometimes prohibits us from singing a song on the grounds that "Val sings that" or "Ginetta sings that" --- some tunes belong exclusively to their trademark performers. We are forbidden to whistle under any circumstances.

My recent updates have tried to chart the advances of Ellie's language, but a similar description of the last four months would be like the play-by-play of an explosion. Ellie now employs most of the conventional weapons in the arsenal of English grammar: past, future, and three forms of present tense, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, possessives, contractions, and a host of idiomatic expressions that she has transferred from one setting to another. (When Lisa asked her if she needed help after tripping on the path the other day, Ellie cheerily replied "I think I got it.") While she still makes her share of mistakes, she gets more things right than wrong, and many of the mistakes are just incorrect applications of the standard rules --- "I broked it," "Mama goed there," "it's mine's," or her recent adjectival invention "that's grossious."

A few weeks ago, Ellie decided to replace "yeah" with an emphatic and sybilant "yess." Even after several days, this reply caught us by surprise every time. Just a one word shift, but it sounded like a fundamental change of character, from dreamy and slightly indecisive to crisp, confident, and businesslike. Yess, absolutely, right away, no hesitation. After a couple of weeks, Ellie completed this experiment with precision, and now she is back to "yeah."

"Ummm" and "why?" are more recent additions to Ellie's repertoire. When asked a question to which she does not have an immediate answer, or does not want to give an immediate answer, Ellie goes into a long, thoughtful "ummmm," with a slight smile playing on closed lips as she holds us in suspense.
"Do you want some pear?"
"Ummmm ... later."
"But you just asked for some pear, and I cut it up
for you. Don't you want to eat it?"
"Ummmm ... no."
She has figured out that "why?" is a question one can ask to extend a conversation, but she doesn't fully understand what the nature of the question is. Thus we have many befuddling exchanges like
"What's that?"
"That's a picture of a horse."
"Why?"

Other amusing phrases have come, stayed a few days or weeks, and gone. While "Bye bye ... see you later" is standard usage, it can be charmingly offbeat when applied to inanimate objects or places, as in "Bye bye car, see you later," "Bye bye playground, see you later," "Bye bye Target, see you later." (Ellie can now identify Target by name from a hundred yards away.) In a similarly factual but incongruous style, Ellie proudly announced one evening that "I found it" --- the ice cream stall on the mazelike lower floor of the North Market --- "with my black shirt on." She recounted this triumph of discovery several times the next day, and "I found it with my [black, red, purple, etc.] shirt on" has become one of Ellie's standard locutions. For self-description, "I'm a good guy" alternates with "I'm a ogre."

When Ellie draws on the side of the bathtub with her water-soluble crayons, she assures us that "my story's almost done," and sometimes warns us that "it's a little bit scary." If we ask her what it's about, she can usually come up with something --- an airplane, a pumpkin, etc. Her drawings are moving closer to something discernible, and like many artists she has the good sense to wait until she has finished her work and looked it over before giving it a title (usually a rocket ship, a butterfly, a flower, a circle, a bird, or an airplane). After finishing one of her recent drawings at school, Ellie solemnly informed her teacher that "it's in French."

For reasons that remain obscure to us, Ellie one day started referring to her privates as ... Snuffy. Since she persisted in the practice, and showed no hesitation as to whether this was or was not the correct term, we eventually adopted it as well. At first it seemed to be a proper, capital-S noun, as in "Snuffy's hiding" (diaper on) or "Hi Snuffy!" (diaper off). But it also functions as a generic, small-s noun, as we learned when Ellie stripped the dress off one of her dolls, inspected the seamless body underneath, and asked "Where's the snuffy?" We have also heard Ellie muttering about her duck's snuffy, so the term is apparently not specific to the human species. By now we have established that Mama has a snuffy and Daddy doesn't, and Ellie periodically declares this fact at bathtime with a tone of feminine solidarity. (We have settled on "willy" as the complementary term most similar in spirit.) As best we can tell, the source of Ellie's terminology is the Sesame Street character Snuffalupagus, usually called Snuffy, but since he is an enormous, hairy, elephantine muppet, we remain flummoxed by the connection.

Ellie has become increasingly opinionated about her clothing, much to her mother's distress. Lisa now has to offer a choice of two outfits when Ellie gets dressed, and even then she may defiantly demand the shirt from one combination and the pants from the other. Band-aids have become her primary fashion accessory --- Elmo or Shrek preferred, Winnie-the-Pooh acceptable in a pinch. She typically goes through three or four band-aids a day, though of course more are required if she actually *has* a scratch or a cut. In dressing, application of band-aids, and many other activities, Ellie prefers to do as much as she can on her own. However, since her threshold for frustration is just over two seconds, "Iwanttodoit allbyself" (two words, 6.5 syllables) is often followed by "Hayelllpp!" (2.5 syllables), a plea issued with falling-off-a-cliff urgency regardless of circumstance.

In state-of-the-union spirit, here is a brief catalog of current favorites:

The fall's travels began with a trip to Chicago at Labor Day, for Grandma Sue's birthday party, and a visit to Virginia a week later, with four grandparents and four parents looking on as Ellie and her two-month younger cousin Alexi played the days away. Combining work and play, we took a trip to Western Massachusetts over a perfect early October weekend, staying first with OSU friends on sabbatical and their two-year old twins Gus and Jo, then with my graduate school classmate, his wife, and their five-year old world traveler Victoria. The kids kept Ellie well entertained. Since I was giving a talk at U. Mass., I missed the outing to Ann Hamilton's installation at Mass MoCA, where the three two-year olds dressed in brilliant orange splashed their way through a lake of white paper sheets. The photos are great.

The other fall trip was a jaunt to Cincinnati with our playgroup just after election day. We went to the zoo, the children's museum, and the aquarium, and we stayed in a hotel with an indoor pool, a good free breakast, and, most important to a glum group of liberals, free drinks at happy hour. Joining the playgroup --- a dozen or so families with toddlers from our part of town --- has been the biggest development of the fall, expanding both Ellie's and our circle of friends. We get together a couple of times a month to enjoy fractured adult conversation while doing our best to ensure that no serious injuries occur on the kids' side of the party, and we sometimes go out in smaller groups or run into each other around town. The season finale was a Christmas party complete with an impressively authentic Santa, who distributed parentally selected toys to every kid in the group. Ellie is delighted with her blue hippo flashlight, and she has convinced herself that we saw the reindeer up on the third floor just before Santa flew off.

As Ellie's awareness of the world grows, she has come to realize that people have multiple roles, even her parents. Once she figured out that we had names in addition to our familial titles, she became very intrigued by this fact, and we went through many rounds in which she pointed to us one by one as we called out "David, Lisa, Ellie." We picked the name Elena in part because we are fond of its diminutive, but we do occasionally trot out the name in its full glory. During one of our "What's Mama's name? ..." sessions, Lisa decided to test whether "Elena" had registered. "Ellie, do you know what YOUR real name is?" Ellie pondered this question for several seconds with furrowed brows, then glanced up with the air of someone who has just pierced a long-standing mystery. "Sweetpea?"