Ellie, Lisa, and I spent the fall in Princeton, with Lisa and I both visiting the Institute for Advanced Study (Lisa was a member in the School of Historical Studies, and I was a happily trailing spouse). Ellie had a great time. She loved the Crossroads Nursery School (especially her teachers Vicky, Shelly, and Susan), and she loved being able to ride her bike through the housing complex to school every morning, and she loved being able to go after school to the immediately adjacent playground and keep playing with her friends (while Lisa and I took turns running along the canal towpath). Ellie's combination of agility, loquaciousness, and natural ringleader tendencies made her a "popular" kid, with classmates and teachers alike. She found kindred spirits in her classmate Kristiana and in Miriam, the 6-year old daughter of our Princeton friends Debbie and Andrew; she also renewed her friendship with Camilla (see Update 5), daughter of our friends Michael and Sofia. We found parenting to be an entirely new axis for interdisciplinary interaction, as we could carry on (fragmented) adult conversations at the playground, and two or three four-year olds could do a reasonable job of entertaining themselves in parallel to the adults during dinner gatherings. Of course, inattention had its perils. One time we had retired to the living room with our friends Mario and Kriss, while Ellie and their son Luka built a spaceship by lining up all of the dining table chairs in the kitchen. We looked up every so often and could see that this activity was keeping them surprisingly busy, but it wasn't until they called us over to admire their handiwork that we realized they had distributed the entire contents of our refrigerator onto the chairs, as they provisioned the spaceship for what was evidently going to be a very long trip.
Ellie does not play with dolls, but she is very attached to her enormous zoo of stuffed animals, and she plays with her animals in the way that I imagine many girls her age play with dolls. She narrates them through a lot of complex interactions, worries constantly about their physical comfort, and spends a good deal of time putting them to bed or caring for them when they are sick (they are prone to illness, but quick to recover). In the car, animals have to buckled in, sitting comfortably, with arms OVER the seat belt, before we go anywhere. When riding in my bicyle bag to school, or in a backpack or a pocket, animals have to be peeking out of the bag to see but have arms and shoulders INSIDE so as not to get cold. At nighttime, each animal has to have an appropriate bed (shoebox, frisbee), and blanket (plastic bags, PJ top, underpants). They sometimes sleep in pairs, an encoding of relationships that we presume are Platonic. Some of the pairings are obvious: Zebra and George the Monkey because they both have long, dangly arms with velcro at the end; Apple and Blue because they are both blue puppies. It's harder to decide who should sleep with Anteater (sometimes called "Ant-feeder"); his long nose makes everyone a bit nervous. All animals have to be properly tucked in, and Ellie complains loudly if their feet stick out beyond the blanket, or if their arms are under the blanket when they want them over, or over the blanket when they want them under.
Some animals have name-names, and some are just named for what they are. The former category includes George, Apple, Blue, Snickerdoodle (a purple teddy bear, gift from great grandmother Marjorie), Honey Hill (a small white kitten), Sidekick (a monkey, mascot of ITV Channel 4, who wears a tiny tee-shirt emblazoned with his name), Madia (MAY-dee-ah, a red chinese dragon), Chocolate Moose, and Peter Rabbit. The latter category, includes Zebra, Lion, Little Lion (slightly smaller, with magnet feet), Frog (also with magnet feet), Little Purple Bear (easily distinguished from Snickerdoodle by size and by his black witch's hat), Kangaroo, Snake (four feet long and plush, purchased from the American Museum of Natural History with Ellie's allowance money), Tiger, and Rabbit (not to be confused with Peter Rabbit). Little Huggie Bear and Joey (the baby kangaroo) fit in either category. Note that these are only the animals who came to or were acquired in Princeton, and even so the list is incomplete.
Most animals are either "just a baby" or "only one year old" or "two years old" (sometimes rendered as "just two years old"). They often have a birthday just coming up, or sometimes a birthday just past. The age of any one animal can go forward or backward from one week to the next, or even within a single day. Ellie often tells us that Little Huggie Bear is "getting bigger every day," or that Sidekick the monkey will soon outgrow his tee-shirt. After school one day, she informed me in an admiring tone of voice that "Little Huggie Bear may be little, but he's VERY strong. He helped me fold up my bedding after rest time: I folded up one side, and he folded up the other." Ellie's animals often like to do with each other the same things that Ellie likes to do with her friends. One morning, she peeled off Sidekick's tee-shirt, set him bouncing on the bed with Snickerdoodle, and told us with enthusiasm that "Now they're naked buddies; they're doing the naked dance!"
Gender is somewhat flexible, a feature of playing with animals rather than dolls. When pressed on the question, Ellie generally identifies Snickerdoodle as female, but Snickerdoodle's pronoun in casual discussion is almost always "he." And while Snickerdoodle is most often in the baby/toddler category, Ellie announced one morning that, to her surprise and ours, "He's already a mama!"
Ellie's animal play often casts her in the role of responsible
grown-up, though Lisa and I sometimes have to help out as well.
One day, the blue puppies were playing on the bed with
the anteater, but they seemed to be having trouble getting along.
"Why doesn't Blue like Anteater?" I asked.
"Because of his nose."
One evening, while watching a video with Lion (6" tall, tail included), Ellie announced that he was fighting with her and had to be sent to his room (a.k.a. Ellie's room). I was asked to take him there and tell him that he would be allowed out when he was ready to behave. A few minutes later, Ellie asked Lisa to go retrieve him, but to "give him a little talking to" before he came back. This lion time-out did seem to stop the fighting behavior, but he soon dived headfirst into Ellie's popcorn bag and was in trouble again. A few minutes later we went out, and Ellie tucked Lion inside her fleecy (peeking out, of course). "Lion's just a baby," she explained, "and I worry about him all the time. If he runs into the street, he'll be in big trouble." In the car she explained that it was important for HER not to run into the street because "then Lion will think he should do that." Lion is still easily scared, being just a baby, but Ellie is both protecting him and teaching him to roar whenever he sees any bad guys. Ellie has a very loud and fierce roar, so she is a good teacher.
Animal ailments are usually confined to colds and fevers, but occasionally something more mysterious crops up. One morning, just after waking up herself, Ellie received a phone call on her sippy cup. When I asked if it was one of her animals calling, Ellie emitted a remarkable sound somewhere between a roar and a croak. She then explained that it was indeed one of her animals, who was suffering from "a voice-ache." She told me that I was the doctor and handed the sippy-cup-phone to me to make arrangements with the nearly speechless patient. Ellie and I soon established that it was Little Lion who had the voice-ache, and maybe the magnet-foot frog as well. I went off to find them and administer medicine. I advised the lion that he should keep completely quiet for the rest of the morning. Ellie then went off to have a bath, but insisted that I read Little Lion a book so that he wouldn't get bored. Lisa and I are frequently left to read to or otherwise amuse her animals while Ellie goes off to do something else. We have limited patience for this.
The boundary between make-believe and reality is firm, but movable. One day Ellie handed me a little bird that she and Lisa had made from a craft kit (tongue depressors, pipe cleaners, cotton balls, feathers, googly eyes), and asked me to give it to Little Purple Bear. "Hello, Little Purple Bear," I squawked, but Ellie broke in to explain that "Little Purple Bear is real, but the bird is just a toy." Then, to make sure I got the point: "So she can't talk."
The boundary between toys and people is also porous, in both directions. Ellie sometimes slaps herself on the head and emits an electro-music toned "Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing," with her head vibrating back and forth. This action probably derives from her Wacky Stick, which made this sound when she bonked it on her head, or from Boing, a space-alien-like glob who made this sound when dropped from a sufficient height, or from both. Occasionally she tells us "Look!", then hits her head, which vibrates but makes no noise. She explains that her batteries are dead and she needs new ones. "Fortunately," she says, "I carry a screwdriver" -- so we dutifully unscrew her back, replace the batteries, and screw it in place again. "Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing!" (Ellie also complains of dead batteries when she doesn't want to walk and must be carried; in these situations, replacing them has surprisingly little effect.) Sometimes the mechanism gets messed up: Ellie knocks her head and instead of "Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing" we get (in the same musical tone) "Chocolate miiiiilk." Or sometimes "Moooo." "I think I put the wrong things in my head," Ellie explains.
Besides the intricacy of her animal play, the other most interesting aspect of Ellie's recent development is her strong attachment to books. While Ellie has always been pro-book, it is only in the past few months that reading books with us, or looking at them on her own, has become one of her favorite activities, and the range of our reading and her appreciation has expanded enormously. One evening when we came home from school, Ellie immediately moved all of her books from the bookcase to the sofa, sat down next to them, and proceeded to leaf page-by-page through every single one. Even at three seconds per page, this was a rare 30-minute burst of intensely focused activity. It hasn't been repeated in quite this form, but she does fairly often sit herself down with a big stack of books and page through all of them. She remains especially fond of pop-up books, most of all the Robert Sabuda or Matthew Reinhart spectaculars, of which she now has an extensive collection: Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, A Winter's Tale, Christmas Alphabet, The Night Before Christmas, The Twelve Days of Christmas, The Wizard of Oz, Dinosaurs, and Sharks. We have recently changed the name of "the diaper bag" to "the book bag," since that is what it mostly carries these days. Books are a lot heavier than diapers.
Ellie has become much better at picking out the emotional undercurrents in stories, inferring from the action something about how the characters are feeling. Some of her favorites this fall have been the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel (the first one given to us by her friends Livie and Zack), in which beautifully understated narratives and drawings reveal many facets of the adventurous, optimistic Frog, the cautious, curmudgeonly Toad, and the close friendship between them. Other favorites include the Amelia Bedelia books (whose wordplay requires a lot of explanation the first time through, but whose cheery stories of embarrassing errors can then be enjoyed over and over), the brilliantly illustrated Zen Shorts and Micawber, Roald Dahl's The Enormous Crocodile (the first of Ellie's books in which we are invited to root against the main character), and a stack of pocket-sized Robert Munsch books (presents from Douglas Scott), which offer a delightful mix of absurdified fairy tale and kid-level science fiction. These have not replaced the verbally simpler picture books like Don't Let the Pigeon Drive The Bus, No David!, or Rudolf von Flugel's Busy Day, but they have opened up a much wider range of complex story-telling, making our reading lives richer. The only book that Ellie has steadfastly resisted is Dr. Seuss's The Sleep Book, maybe because Lisa and I emphasized too heavily how much we enjoyed it when we were young, or maybe because it is too focused on her least favorite activity.
Of course, we have continued our tradition of bedtime chapter books. Between returning from Paris and leaving for Princeton, we read Dr. Dolittle, The Hunting of the Snark, Ace The Very Important Pig (grandson of Babe, The Gallant Pig), A Cricket in Times Square, and The Littles. Dr. Dolittle and Cricket were Ellie's favorites from this set. Snark was an act of desperation, when we finished Dr. D. and hadn't yet been to the library to find a replacement, leaving me to search the house for illustrated books. I had to read each episode ("Fit") of Lewis Carroll's epic nonsense poem twice, once to explain what it meant, and a second time through continuously so that Ellie could hear the meter and the rhyme. Even though 80 percent of it remained far over her head, Ellie enjoyed the tale (and the terrific drawings), especially the ending in which the Baker cried "Boo . . . ," then softly and suddenly vanished away (as people do when they encounter a Boojum, and the Snark WAS a Boojum, you see). She repeated "All they heard was Boo . . ." for the rest of the week, and she softly and suddenly vanished numerous times.
Princeton, like Columbus, has an excellent public library, and we made constant use of it, for picture books, bedtime books, and the occasional kid video. Our bedtime books in Princeton were The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Mr. Popper's Penguins, Half-Magic, The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, The Wizard of Oz, Old Mother West Wind, The Reluctant Dragon, Tucker's Countryside, Ned Feldman: Space-Pirate, Hugh Pine And The Good Place, and Jules Feiffer's A Room With A Zoo (which, unfortunately, we had to return to the library before finishing). All of these were enjoyable, but the most successful were The Mouse and the Motorcyle (which was the first "novel" I read to myself, back in 2nd grade) and The Wizard of Oz, which I feared was pushing the limits on scariness and complexity but which worked out well. (The pop-up version has kept this story in mind, and in post-Christmas treks around Passfield Farm, Ellie would sometimes fall dramatically to the ground, overcome by poppies.) Half-Magic was the most complicated, with its narrative device of a magic coin that grants precisely half of the possessor's wish, and a story that includes time-travel, globe-hopping, and adults who don't understand what their kids have figured out. Our attempt to follow The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle confirmed my suspicion that Ellie can't yet sustain interest through a 300-page book; we abandoned ship 2/3 of the way along and will have to meet the Great Glass Sea Snail when we return in a few months.
These books, their characters, and their themes of voyages
and pirates and magic make frequent appearances in Ellie's play.
One morning, having loaded up her bed with animals and pirate
paraphernalia, she told me that
"Here we go," said I.
"No, we're not going yet. It's really hard to get a bedroom
that's pretending to be a pirate ship going."
"How should we do it?"
"By MAGIC." Pause. "There's only one problem. We don't have
a magic wand. I'm going to go buy one at the drugstore.
I'll be back soon."
From some combination of book-reading, video-watching,
school play, and natural inclination, Ellie has developed a
remarkable level of pre-school dramatic flair. She has a big vocal
range, both pitch and volume, and she uses all of it;
in play and conversation, she is constantly shifting from
one voice to another. Ellie especially likes using the low and loud
parts of her register, the "booming" voice of a circus ringmaster or
radio announcer, or Shere-Khan, the Jungle Book tiger. One morning,
I walked in on Ellie sitting up in bed, with each of her
Christmas-themed pop-ups opened to a Santa Claus page. She proceeded
to shake each of the three books in turn and declare, in her
"booming" voice:
"No, I am the real Santa."
"No, I am the real Santa."
"No, I am the real Santa."
Etc.
Ellie is developing a sense of irony, which she applies in
combination with her gift for vocal quotation. Her latest stock
phrase, which she uses in response to any query for which she doesn't
have an immediate answer, is "That's a very good question,"
delivered in the thoughtful tone of an academic playing for time
in a post-seminar Q&A session.
"That's a very good question."
"What should we do this afternoon, Ellie?"
"That's a very good question."
"What would you like for breakfast, Ellie?"
"That's a very good question."
Ellie clearly leans to the verbal rather than the mathematical,
but she did surprise us the other day by asking
"Daddy, can you teach Tiger to make a helix?"
Lisa and I gave each other a puzzled look.
"Well, Tiger's first word was helix."
"Yeah, teach him to make that."
Lest all of this sound too intellectual to be true, I should also emphasize that Ellie's taste in humor these days runs principally to jokes about flatulence and other bodily functions. In particular, any phrase can be made funny simply by adding the word poop. Her 4-year-old friends also find this brand of humor highly amusing, so when two or more are in the house the conversation becomes a veritable poop-a-rama. In the last month, "Na-na-na-boo-boo" has joined her vocabulary (with the classic, sing-song intonation), and it figures prominently in conversation, especially with her peers. Ellie is prone to crying when she doesn't get what she wants, and whenever she breaks something or does something wrong, she gets angry with whichever one of us is closer, a form of pre-emptive strike. She emphasizes her feelings by repetition of amplifiers: "I really, really, really, really, really, really, really ... want that," or "I'm very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, ... hungry." She'll start a race if she thinks she's got a good position, but if either of us gets ahead she falls down injured, or stops and declares that it wasn't a race after all. "The only problem with playing winning games," she explained one morning, "is that I always want to win. And if I don't I cry."
Ellie's grammatical mistakes are few and far between these
days, though we get occasional gems like "So far-ly, I like
this book." However, she does sometimes respond to a question
with baby-like babble, then proudly declares that
"Mama asked [something], but all she got was nonsense."
We think this formula may refer back to a line in some book,
but we've been unable to figure out what. Ellie sometimes
directs these exchanges herself.
Mama: "Do you love me, Ellie?"
Ellie to Mama: "Wah goo gif nov wah goo."
Mama: "..."
Ellie: "All you got was nonsense."
Mama: "..."
Ellie: "Ask me again."
Mama: "Do you love me, Ellie?"
Ellie: "Yes!"