Ellie's conversation is now dense with references to books, movies, and videos, a world of allusion. Her play is a web of re-enactments and re-imaginings. A few examples:
Following Ellie's birthday (and my last update), we stayed another month in Columbus, then headed off for Paris in July. We spent several days in England first, seeing a few slivers of London and visiting Marjorie in Brighton. Fortunately, the weather in Brighton was much better than two years ago, so Ellie got much more feet-in-the-water time, though it was still too cold for swimming in the ocean to be an attractive prospect. Marjorie bequeathed to Ellie a blue/violet plush bear, who, under the nom-de-jouet of Snickerdoodle, became the favorite of Ellie's character toys for the next month. In Paris we again stayed near the Jardin du Luxembourg, this time in a one room apartment with a lofted sleeping area and a bit of history (Amedeo Modigliani once lived there). We did many of our traditional Paris-with-Ellie things: the Ferris Wheel at the Tuileries (the top priority on her list), the mechanical horses and dragon roller coaster at the Jardin d'Acclimatation, the Cite des Enfants at Parc de la Villette, and full utilization of a 12-visit pass to the Ducko Playground (officially known as Le Poussin Vert) in the Jardin du Luxembourg. We made a long weekend trip to Heidelberg to visit Hans-Walter and MB: highlights for Ellie were a trip to the giant Heidelberg Schwimbad, a ride on a chairlift, and her first fireworks display. Highlights for us were the company, our first bottle of Dom Perignon (in joint celebration of Lisa's and MB's birthdays), and a couple of nights with an air conditioner.
It was fun to be in Paris as "Les Bleus" made their way toward the World Cup Final, with a seemingly heroic story building for Zinedine Zidane. The France-Brazil game was a thrill to watch. Ellie never got into watching on TV, but she did get into the spirit with the official replica jersey (bearing Zidane's name and number) that Lisa bought for her, and "Zizou" soon joined her gallery of characters alongside Mr. Incredible, Buzz LightYear, and others with superhuman powers. Ellie would point out all the other Zizou shirts she saw in Paris (of which there were plenty!) with pride and excitement. It was a huge disappointment when Zidane exited the final in overtime with a head butt and a red card; it took the wind out of our sails, and out of the French in general, in a way that just losing the penalty kick shoot-out could never have done. But it was a good ride while it lasted, and Ellie will continue to enjoy the shirt as long as it fits. Her soccer skills are improving as well, but she can only stick to her feet for so long before she picks the ball up and declares that she is the goalie, or that we are now playing basketball.
As always, Paris with Ellie is largely about playgrounds. However, a trip to the playground these days is less about the climbing and running and sliding per se than about the narrative that goes along with them. A trip to the "pirate ship playground" at Jardin Atlantique could be positively dizzying, with the two of us morphing from Captain Hook and a fellow pirate chased by the crocodile, to Captain Hook and a pirate chased by a flying crocodile, to Shrek and Donkey chased by the Dragon, with fleeting appearances by Dash and Violet, Willie Wonka, the Were-Rabbit, and Zizou. Other park/playground visits could be more quotidian, with narratives that involved cooking or sleeping or putting on plays in various rooms of Ellie's "house." Snickerdoodle frequently came with us to the Ducko Playground, and he was highly prone to injury, falling from slides or ladders or platforms. Ellie would earnestly and urgently explain that she had to stay at pre-school a bit longer, but I should take him to the doctor and the hospital and she would catch up with us there as soon as she could. Once I got to the "hospital" (located on a train car), Ellie would come streaking across the playground and shows great concern for poor Snickerdoodle's sprained ankle or broken arm. Then she would take him back up a ladder and drop him again. Other times Snickerdoodle just had to stay with me and take a nap while Ellie went off to work --- but she warned me that he would cry when he woke up and found she wasn't there. And so he did.
The dominant narratives of the day depend mainly on which video is currently at the top of Ellie's charts, with cycles that typically last a few days. For a while in Paris it was Lady and the Tramp, and Ellie was constantly going around the apartment on all fours, often with great leaps (more frog than dog), saying "I'm Lady" and picking up toys in her teeth. One of us would usually be assigned the role of Tramp, chasing off the bad dogs. We drew the line at her eating dog style from the table, or from the floor. One morning, when I told Ellie for the fourth time that she had to quit jumping around like a dog/frog because it was too noisy for the people downstairs she stopped, suddenly, and looked at me: "What did they hear?" "BUMP, CLUMP, THUMP," I replied. "They think it's Mickey in the Night Kitchen," replied Ellie, picking up my allusion without missing a beat.
For a variety of reasons, this was the most difficult of the months we have spent in Paris. With no separate room for Ellie, a top floor apartment with a skylight, and daylight lasting until 10 pm, it was very difficult to get her to sleep. The record-setting July heat greatly exacerbated this problem and sapped much of our energy during the hottest days. Ellie's sitter (as though anyone "sits" with Ellie around), a French college student named Elsa who came weekdays 11:30-4:30, spoke English well enough to communicate, but not well enough to join in Ellie's high speed narrative life. Ellie gradually warmed to her over four weeks of parks and swimming pools and pony rides and painting, but their relationship never moved beyond an "entente cordiale." Lisa scored big by meeting an American couple with a 3 1/2 year-old son at the Luxembourg wading pools, and Ellie and Idan played well the few times they got together. Unfortunately, Idan was sick for most of our last two weeks, so many playdates were postponed or cancelled. Ellie herself had a fever for the worse part of a week, including the two hottest days of our stay; she did at least enjoy using the thermometer to take the temperature of all of her human, animal, and alien toys in succession.
Literally and metaphorically, Ellie has always had two speeds: RUN and STOP (the latter also known as "carry me," "uppie," "I want to go in the stroller," and, occasionally, asleep). In fact, Ellie has largely lost the ability to walk. She can run, skip, hop, gallop, and walk on all fours, but she finds it nearly impossible to walk half a block with a steady gait. To cover ground on foot at a reasonable average pace, we usually have to convert our journey into a series of races that collectively go in the right direction. (Fortunately, we're told that Ellie does fine walking with her class at school on their periodic treks across campus, so apparently peer pressure can achieve what we cannot.) Ellie's uncontrollable energy is often amusing and part of her charm, but in Paris and since our return we have been trying to help her develop a middle gear that will be easier on her and on everyone else. We especially want to figure out how to head off the unpleasant spirals in which she does something wild, we tell her to calm down, she gets wilder, we tell her louder and more firmly to calm down, and so on to meltdown. We are getting somewhere, but progress is slow.
On the more contemplative side, Ellie is now working actively on writing letters of the alphabet, often interspersed with drawings. She now does passable versions of most capital letters, though whether they come out forward, backward, right-side-up, or upside-down sometimes depends on the direction she happened to choose for the first line. M's and W's sometimes get an extra peak or two. Ellie's favorite writing game is to write a string of letters and ask us what it says. Sometimes, six monkeys fashion, we get a word like moon. Other times, we get combinations that seem to have come from one of those unpronouncable, consonant-rich Eastern European languages, or one of those vowel heavy African languages whose sounds cannot really be captured by the Latin alphabet. I have always assumed that one learns first to read, then to write. However, I can see that in Ellie's case these two may be closely intertwined, since the kinetic, participatory element of writing makes it more interesting for her than passive word recognition. On the mathematical end of things, Ellie's favorite number these days is "five and a half." Most often this refers to minutes, though the units are sometimes unstated ("I want to watch for another five and a half.") Other times, it is difficult to know what to do with the fraction: "I want you to push me [on the swing] really high, five and a half times."
Ellie has also learned to indicate magnitudes by holding
her thumb and forefinger apart. There are, as best I can
tell, two settings, a small, nearly touching one, and a
large one with the two digits fully extended at a 100 degree
angle.
"How big?"
"That big." (Large setting.)
"Do you know how big Stuart is, Mama?"
"How big?"
"That big." (Small setting.)
"Do you know how far it is to the policeman's house?" (This is
the imaginary policeman who has been following us home from the
Jardin du Luxembourg and will "fire" us if he catches up. You
figure it out.)
"No, how far?"
"That far." (Large setting.)
"Do you know how far it is to our house?"
"How far?"
"That far." (Small setting.)
"Good, it looks like we can get home before the policeman catches us."
"Do you know how much we have to wait?"
"How long do we have to wait?"
"That much." (Either setting.)
I recently learned that there is an additional setting.
"This funny." (Large setting.)
"How funny are Mama's jokes?"
"This funny." (Small setting.)
"And how funny are my jokes?"
"This funny." (Ellie holds up her thumb and forefinger,
pressed tightly together.)
Ellie's drawings and paintings are becoming more intricate and sophisticated. We were quite impressed when she started to bring home face-bodies sporting three, co-linear, eye-nose-eye dots, a smile, and stick arms and legs. This remained her standard style for many weeks, with the eventual addition of hair, and an occasional beard in drawings of me. More recently, she has begun to outline structures and body parts that were previously just lines or points, added slant noses, and started to use color to make her representations of characters or people or toys more individually recognizable. Her most successful representation to date is Kirby, the orange, triangular, three-eyed alien pre-schooler from the Chicken Little movie. Other drawings remain more abstract, though sometimes with definite ideas behind them: she frequently draws me a galaxy, or an exploding galaxy, or an exploding galaxy accompanied by an exploding tornado and planets. For a brief period, she was interested in painting "pseudo-Chinese" letters, or in having us paint them for her. One day she wrote down five letter-like forms in a row and informed me that "This is an E, only different. This is an L, only different. This is another L, only different ..."
Our new bedtime books since the last update are three E.B. White novels --- Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan --- another Paddington book, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (still in process, and perhaps about to be abandoned as it is getting scary). Ellie has also "written" a couple of chapter books in collaboration with our neighbor, Diane. As I understand it, the process is simply that Ellie tells Diane what the titles of the chapters are, and Diane writes them down. For now, I think, the chapter titles are supposed to convey the action, leaving the details to the reader's imagination. I'll close, therefore, with Ellie's first literary foray, reproduced in its entirety.
Chapter 1: The New Suit
Chapter 2: Ellie Takes Off The Suit
Chapter 3: Ellie Takes A Nap
Chapter 4: Ellie Wakes Up And Gets Dressed
Chapter 5: Ellie Goes Downstairs To Eat Chocolate Breakfast
Chapter 6: Ellie Needs Help Opening The Chocolate Tin
Chapter 7: Ellie Takes Care Of The Toys
Chapter 8: It's A Special Day -- So We Have Soy Pretzels
Chapter 9: Ellie Is Going To Make Diane A Fire
Chapter 10: We Make A Train
Chapter 11: It's A Better Day In Toyland
Chapter 12: Ellie Makes A Nest
Chapter 13: The Festival Begins!