Ellie turned four yesterday. It's been a year and a half since my last update, several eons of Ellie's life. In that time she has been to Paris (for the third summer running), Virginia, Utah, Berkeley, Arizona, and New York City. She has learned to to swim (her backstroke is better than her dog paddle), graduated from a tricycle to a bike with training wheels, traded her 3-wheel scooter for a flashy, speedy two-wheeler, and taken her first, heavily assisted glide on rollerblades. The days when a parent on foot can keep up with Ellie on wheels are nearly over. She has learned to spell her name, to type it, and to write it in capital letters, which are always printed E-L-L-I-E but don't necessarily follow that sequence left-to-right on the page. She has moved from the infant/toddler classroom of the Ohio State Child Care Center to the pre-school classroom of the A. Sophie Rogers Lab School, where she cooks brownies, builds dinosaur habitats and chocolate factories, plays superheroes and duck-duck goose, does puzzles, shares toys, waters plants, feeds animals, draws ever more recognizable pictures, sharpens her drumming skills, and learns how to negotiate her way through life in a roomful of 20 three, four, and five year-olds. She converses, tells stories, argues, bargains, and jokes. She has wound her next door neighbors around her finger almost as tightly as her parents. She has lost a grandparent, and is just old enough to understand what that means.
Since the events and the changes are too numerous for me to remember, much less recount, I'll focus this update on the most striking qualitative development of Ellie's last year and a half: the emergence of a rich imaginative life. This began --- predictably enough, I suppose --- with videos, especially "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (Gene Wilder version). One day, the not-yet-three Ellie surprised us with an alarmed cry of "Help, I'm turning into a blueberry!", and insisted that we roll her off to the juicing room. [Violet Beauregarde's discomforting transformation into a purple sphere is the scene that I remember most vividly from my youth.] We replayed this scene many times, with Ellie, Lisa, and I all getting our turns as Oompa Loompas and the blueberry-girl. A couple of days later, Ellie picked up a scrap of foil and ran through the house waving it above her head, declaring "I've got a golden ticket!"
After watching Stuart Little, we went through many days of Ellie presenting an imagined Stuart to us in her gently cupped hand, and he became a frequent visitor at breakfast. This custom revived briefly after Ellie moved to the lab school, with Stuart replaced by the class guinea pig, Pop Tart. Ellie has learned of princesses and dragons and "true love" from Shrek, of sharks and perseverance from Nemo, and of standing up to Jabberwocks from a stunningly bad TV-movie version of Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Ellie's favorite movie (and our favorite of her videos, by far) is The Incredibles, about a family of undercover superheroes. Since Ellie is precociously fast, she usually identifies herself with Dash, the nine-year old boy who can, when pressed, outrun a helicopter. Sometimes she is Violet, the teenage daughter, whose specialties are force fields and invisibility. While Lisa and I usually get the parental roles, Ellie does have a good, arm-maximally-extended, Elastigirl salute. For next Halloween, we are lobbying her to go as Edna Mode, the superheroes' suit designer; Ellie does a perfect Edna rendition of "No Capes!" When we are out with her bicycle or scooter, Ellie and I are often pursued by "the moths" (an Ellie invention, as best I can tell), who we alternately run from, hide from, repel with force fields, or fight with air punches. On our Sunday morning jaunts to Stauf's Coffee, Lisa is usually dragged out to "fight the robot," who takes the form of a large metal cabinet that sits in the parking lot of a nearby bank.
Ellie's imaginings often involve a complex mix of herself, her friends, fictional characters, and stuffed animals. One evening, she lined up her hedgehog, her rabbit, her moose, and her lion on the bookshelf, and explained to Lisa that "this is Winnie-the-Pooh, this is Eeyore, this is Kanga, and this is Piglet."
"But in this version," she went on, "they're all different!"
For several months, I was abetting this mixture of fiction and reality with bedtime stories. While we always read picture books with Ellie before bed, the tradition of lights-out, lying down stories began around the time that Ellie turned three, when I decided that the exasperating nightly half-hour of attempting to work while jumping up every four minutes to respond to Ellie's demands could perhaps be replaced by twenty minutes of telling her a story, during which she would gradually slow down. (On a good night, this tactic works, and on a bad night the story is followed by a half hour of jumping up every four minutes ...) I ran through various classics, like Jack and the Beanstalk or Cinderella, but I was surprised by how few I could remember (and, once I finally got around to checking out fairy tale books from the library, by how much I had mangled the ones that I did tell). So most of the time I would invent stories involving Ellie and her friends, or toys, or book or video characters. Among the most popular, alongside Goldilocks, and the Three Little Pigs, were the story of Ellie and Abeni teleporting to Egypt to visit the Sphinx, the Pyramid, and the Mummy, the story of Ellie and Abeni climbing into a hot air balloon at school and being carried across the eastern United States to Gran's house, and the story of Ellie seeking (in the hide-and-seek sense) Lisa and finding, in the various nooks and crannies of the house, Liam, Gromit, Abeni, Derek, Little Michael, Anna, Muzzy, Julian, Karl, a Wild Thing, Daddy, and (at last) Mama. Asking Ellie what story she wanted was always a risk, since she would often demand the same story I had told the previous three nights, or order up a new creation like "Ellie and Abeni and Anna and Elmo wearing bear slippers on the Ferris Wheel." Not the plot of an instant classic.
Last November, on a night when I was too tired to face coming up with a new story or even retelling an old one, I tried the experiment of reading a chapter from Winnie-the-Pooh (the A. A. Milne, E. H. Shepard original rather than the Disney [TM] versions she had previously encountered). Somewhat to my surprise, this worked very well, in part because Ellie took great interest in the illustrations, and could follow the story from the pictures in places where the language got too subtle for her. Having already decided that my nighttime inventions would never rise to the level of Lewis Carroll, I was happy to switch to reading. Since Winnie-the-Pooh, we have made it through Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, The House at Pooh Corner, Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Wind in the Willows, A Bear Called Paddington, Peter Pan, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, My Father's Dragon (trilogy), and Babe, in approximately that order. Ellie has enjoyed most of these, with characters and drawings playing a bigger role than plot. I was particularly surprised at how much she liked the Wind in the Willows despite the quietness of the action and the lyrical tone of the prose. She was fascinated by Badger and developed a genuine attachment for Mole, Rat, and Toad, so that they, too, became staples of our everyday conversations for several weeks. Since most children's classics are now movies as well, we have watched more than half of these on video, sometimes before reading them, sometimes after. The Wind and the Willows was an interesting case in point --- much too slow for Ellie before we had read the book, but greatly enjoyed afterwards.
When Ellie was just shy of three, our across-the-street neighbor (whose daughter, Anna, is four months older) convinced us it was time to take the girls to their first play, a production of "The Velveteen Rabbit" at the Columbus Children's Theater. To our surprise, this worked; both girls sat mostly still and mostly quiet through the hour-long show, which was 15 times longer than they would normally sit mostly still and mostly quiet. We did nearly lose Ellie 3/4 of the way through, when she set off down the aisle and made it halfway to the stage before we stopped her. She found the experience of a live performance with costumed actors, most of them children, bizarre and interesting, especially when they came back on stage to sign programs after the play, still in costume but no longer in character. That night, and for several days afterwards, Ellie would bring us pieces of paper, and we would hand them back to her asking if she would please sign our program, which she did with a brimmingly proud smile. Since these first outings, we have since been to two more Children's Theater plays, Sesame Street Live, the Ringling Brothers' Circus, a ballet of Alice in Wonderland, and Dora's Pirate Adventure, so by now Ellie considers herself a theater aficionado.
Ellie's other pre-three theater experience was a dance school recital including Ellie's fabulous baby-sitter, Sandra, who also works as a dance instructor. We sat in the way back to allow easy exit in case of emergency. For several weeks thereafter we would hear about "the little Sandra," who had been dancing down there on the stage. Despite our explanations, Ellie regarded the little Sandra's relation to the big, in-person Sandra as rather ambiguous. When Ellie and I took a balloon ride in Paris the following summer, "the little Mama" also entered our lexicon, but by then I think she had figured out the impact of perspective.
While many of her contemporaries are in a "Why?" phase,
Ellie's preferred question for the last several months
has been "What's he [she/it/they] saying?" This question
is usually addressed to Lisa or me, with reference to
stuffed animals, other toys, video characters,
book characters, friends, the dog next door, or
any one/thing else that might plausibly have something
to say.
"I want more quarters."
"What's Cassie saying?"
"I hope Ellie is going to give me some treats"
(or, "I hope Ellie is going to spill some of those goldfish").
"What are the moths saying?"
"Rats, we can't get at them through the force field."
Of course, these questions often leave us gaping wordlessly
for an answer, at least temporarily.
What's Dora [the figurine, based on the TV character] saying?"
"Uuuuhhhmmm . . . Maybe 'Yuck!' Or 'Adios!'"
A common variant on this theme is "If [I/he/she/you] did X, what would [you/she/he/I] say?" Ellie often seems to pursue these questions as a form of gedanken-experimental psychology, developing or testing her theory of human behavior based on our hypothetical responses to her hypothetical situations.
I'll close with a few of my favorites from the last year.
Ellie, not yet three, takes my hat, puts it on her head:
Three and a half, near the end of a term in which Lisa
has been teaching until 7:45 two nights a week:
Ellie, earnestly: "I and Nicholas had to work late. We
were working really hard."
Me: "What were you working on?"
Ellie, still more earnestly: "We were working in the block area."
Ellie, three and a half, spinning a spiral-striped candy cane in her fingers: "It's pretending to get longer and shorter."
Ellie, to Lisa, yesterday, while opening a present from one
of her classmates:
Mikayla's a My-Little-Pony girl."
(We consider introducing Ellie to the concept of 'regifting.'
However, she eventually decides to open My Little Pony and play with it.)
Ellie, to me, this morning, in the car:
"Usually, I'm an Incredibles girl. But I can be a My-Little-Pony girl, too."