Cerin Amroth

A couple weeks ago, Nate had plans during the day on a Saturday, so I took the kids to go see Where the Wild Things Are. In retrospect, it wasn’t really a young kids movie. It was a very good movie, but I had a hard time separating my own reactions to it from watching Ella and Dom’s reactions.

The emotions and situations were decidedly pre-adolescent in their potrayl. There was a lot related to the loss of childhood and innocence, as well as loneliness and not being accepted. The only true moments of escape were related to when Max and the Wild Things were just romping around having fun and getting lost in their play. I thought it was actually very true to the conflicted feelings hinted at by the book. Reading the book, I’ve always been struck by the pain of the “We’ll eat you up we love you so” declaration by the Wild Things when they see that Max plans to leave them. The interesting part of the movie is that these lines are directly quoted, but more as endearing statements. The pain and bitterness shows up elsewhere in the Wild Things actions and their own words.

I think the kids enjoyed the movie for its imagery and playful scenes, as well as the magic of seeing the drawings from the book come to life. At the very end when Max was leaving and the Wild Things were sad to see him go, I glanced over at Ella to see her crying. It’s the first time I have seen her cry in that way.

As we were leaving the theater, I asked her how she liked the movie. She said that she liked it, but didn’t like how it made her feel sad at the end. I agreed and said that it was hard to watch something that made you cry. I mentioned that I thought it was also a happy ending because Max made friends and also returned home to be with his mom. Ella acknowledged that, but was clearly most struck by the relationships portrayed between Max and his Wild Thing friends.

In a way, this makes me happy because it shows me how important friends are to Ella. One of her good friends from preschool has been away since the beginning of the school year. While she doesn’t talk about him a lot, every once in a while she’ll comment that she really misses him, especially after she sees a picture of him hanging in her room. It’s amazing to think about all the friends that will touch her and influence her in the years to come … and also a little frightening to think about how those relationships will make her both happy and sad.

Young kids can be so quick to forgive and not hold grudges.  Ella and her friend know how to push each other’s buttons, but no matter how much they annoy each other, the question at the end of the playdate is always, “When can we do it again.” If only we could keep that perspective.

Apropo of the previous post, this was Ella’s outburst at supper just now:

“HOW are we supposed to remember about E and Y?!  And C and K?  And S and Z?  Why did they DO it that way?!”

No good answer, my dear, no good answer.

I’ll admit it:  a few months ago, I was Worried.  The way my mom tells it, I was reading at age 4, largely self-taught.  And while every rational bone in my body told me that every kid is different, there were still those other bones who asked me why Ella didn’t seem quite as gung-ho about the whole process, and didn’t seem particuarly interested in reading on her own at five and a half.  We read to her an awful lot, of course, and she knew her letters and knew enough to work through plenty of the basics on her own.

I knew enough not to try to push her on it, thankfully, or to try to pre-teach her everything she’d be learning in school anyway.  But still there was that part of me that wished she’d be going after it a little bit more on her own.

Fast forward to the present day, a few months into kindergarten.  Our house is covered with letters.  Ella has two notebooks, a couple pads of lined paper, to say nothing of other random sheets of paper, scattered all around, covered in letters.  Sometimes she’ll meticulously transcribe words from books.  Sometimes she’ll just practice writing big and small versions of letters over and over.  More recently she’s been working on composing things on her own, calling out across the room periodically for help with spelling one tricky word or another.   She’s bringing readers home from school and mastering them in short order.  In short, she’s well on her way to reading and writing in full, learning at a terrific rate, and it’s great fun to see.

A couple related thoughts:

1.  While I’ve usually found it easier to just figure stuff out on my own, Ella seems to groove on the classroom environment, and being in that structure has definitely helped her learning take off.  She’s probably more similar to Suanna in that respect.

2.  English is a bitch.  I’ve always known it’s a language with a lot of contradictions and exceptions to its basic rules for grammar, pronunciation, and spelling.  But you don’t realize just how pervasive they are until you’re working through stuff with a five-year old.

Been a while since a good general update …

On the health front:  no worries!  Everyone’s been fine for a couple of weeks running now.  There have been cases of HINI at Dominic’s preschool and probable cases (“flu-like symptoms”) at Ella’s school as well, so we are beset on all sides but soldier on nonetheless.

We’ve started scheduling afterschool playdates for Ella; she has her third one this afternoon.  I wasn’t sure whether she’d be interested in playing with the other girls in her class, most of whom do in fact do things like wear pink or wear dresses or bows in their hair or have flowers on their backpack.  But that doesn’t appear to be a significant impediment.

It’s so fun to watch her learn.  In addition to the general progress we can see in her reading, her Spanish, and all that, we’ve also seen a shift in her solo activities:  she likes to do a lot more drawing than she used to.  When your kid is a baby there’s a particular thrill in seeing something of you in them:  they have your eyes, maybe, or your chin.  As they get older these are replaced by different thrills.  When Ella doodles she doesn’t generally draw pictures of people or things; instead she’ll make outlines of abstract shapes and then have fun filling them in in different colors and shades.  That’s totally what I did too.

Dominic throws tantrums.  The two things in his life that he would like to have happen a lot more often are 1) preschool and 2) Friday lunch with the guys (though he says “Fwiday lunch of the guys”).  He adores preschool two mornings a week and when I must inform him on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that he is not going to school that day: tantrum.  Similarly, every day is a good day as far as he’s concerned for us to drive to Clarendon and meet my friends for lunch, and when we don’t do that on Monday-Thursday it is an occasion for a tantrum.  These are the easy sorts of tantrums, though, where you can distract him — “would you like some juice?” “let’s do a puzzle!”  “hey Dom, show me something that’s green!” — and he’ll forget what he was carrying on about.

Toddler bed continues to work well.  And though I fear to articulate it lest the fact evaporate even as a reach out to touch it:  he’s been sleeping in a little longer.  Today by alarm going off at 7:00 was the first sound of the morning.  Wonder of wonders.

Halloween costumes:  Dominic will be a bat, with one of those toddler onesie costumes.  Ella’s going to wear her long-sleeve hoodie with skeleton ribs on it, and a lone ranger mask.  (She finally outgrew her Peter Pan costume.)  I lobbied hard, as I do every year, for her to go as Kiki — even offered to dress Dom up as a cat so he could be Gigi — but she ain’t biting.

A final anecdote:  I’ve been playing around with Picasa 3.5, which have face recognition technology so once you identify some specific people in your photos it tries to extrapolate which ones they are in all your photos.  And in many ways it works remarkably well — it even identified some childhood photos of me as me after I had identified myself only in adult pictures.  But there’s going to have to be some significant technological advances before any software can tell apart pictures of Ella and Dominic circa 12-18 months . . .

I have finally spent some time editing photos from this summer, so I uploaded quite a few. The first batch is from before my last upload and involves photos from when Theressa, Benoy, Dev, and Neesha came to visit. This was our first time meeting Neesha and the first time that all of us were together in the same place. The last time we saw Theressa, Benoy, and Dev was when Nate and I visited them in the Philippines. We had great fun together and saw an amazing amount of things over the course of a few days. In addition to wanting to make their trip fun-packed, we wanted to mark off several things in a picture book of DC that we had given Dev for his birthday. He brought his book everywhere.

Matt and Sarah also came to visit before heading off for their next overseas destination. The kids had great fun playing with them, and we were happy to get in a few board games and a lot of catching up, as well.

After that, there are a few pictures of everyday life, and then some pictures from a recent visit of Nate’s parents.

Nate and his parents went to Ikea last Friday to get a toddler bed for Dominic. We’ve been meaning to transfer him out of the crib. Now we have motivation because we’re bringing the crib to Vermont at Thanksgiving for an upcoming cousin.

Happily, the transition to the bed has gone well. He wasn’t very excited when I asked him to show it to me after I got home from work. However, he has been good about laying down in it for his naps and bedtimes. The most amazing thing is that he doesn’t get out of it during the middle of the night. He’s woken up a couple of times during the night, and he simply sits up and calls for one of us to come get him.

Last night, he rolled out of bed for the first time. Nate laid him back in the bed, and he went back to sleep quickly. The bed isn’t very high from the ground, so I suspect he hardly woke up.

I suspect it won’t be long until he realizes he can get out himself. For the time being, I’m happy to trade getting up to go to him in the middle of the night with him constantly showing up at our bed side.

We learned at our conference with Ella’s teachers that she is doing well with beginning and ending sounds of short words. She has difficulty with the vowel sounds – but who doesn’t?

This morning, on the way home from church, we passed a billboard advertising a jewelry exhibit at one of the museums downtown. It displayed this garrish, bejeweled squid pint. Ella asked what it was.  I told her it was a squid, and she proceeded to try to spell it. Her guess was S  I  D. I told her I was very impressed that she got that many letters right. I asked if she knew what made the ”kw” sound, and she guessed k. I then told her about the letters Q and U and how they are often paired together. She spelled the word a few more times before feeling satisfied with herself. I told her she had to tell her teachers about it at school tomorrow.

On the health update scene … Ella does have an ear infection, but no fever. The doctor started her on an antibiotic. She went back to school on Friday and complained only once or twice more about her ears hurting.  Dom still has a bad cold, but no fevers.

Tomorrow is Ella’s first day of intersession – a 2-week period between semesters where students can take a break, take fun classes, or get extra help with school work. Ella will be taking a morning class on cooking and stories, and an afternoon class on Mother Goose stories. She’s a little nervous about the different routine, but I’m sure she’ll like 2 weeks without gym – her least liked part of school.

Apologies for leaving readers hanging with that last post — D did miss a day of preschool last week but he was actually fine that day, only staying home because of the fever the day before.  We have had a week of good health, and I was writing this an hour ago I’d have said it was ongoing.

But …

I just picked up Ella from the school nurse.  She had been complaining of a sore ear and it looks like it might be infected.  Doctor’s appointment later this morning.  Fun fun!

So, from Tuesday to Friday, no one was sick here. I had a little feeling like I might be getting the stomach bug but it went away. Then Saturday morning Dom was all congested. He still is. Not that big a deal by itself, but . . .

Today he has a full-on fever. Taking him to the doctor tomorrow.

Will it ever end?

Dominic:

He missed his first day of preschool on Tuesday due to the aforementioned stomach bug, though as it happened he was fine Tuesday and Monday morning was the last time it gave him any trouble.  Thursday I was the parent helper, so I have no idea how it would have gone had I just dropped him off and left, but I suspect it wouldn’t have affected his response that much.  Having met Mrs. M he was happy to see her again.  But really he was just eager to get his hands on the Stuff.

He had been through the downstairs class plenty of times the previous year — I managed the rotating selection of books from the public library on the bookshelf, so every few weeks we’d go to each classroom and pick up books and add new ones.  Every time he’d want to stop and take some of the toys off the shelves, but obviously it was happening right before or after picking Ella up so we never lingered.  And Thursday you could tell he knew he was finally, FINALLY going to be able to get his hands on the sandbox.  And the puzzles.  And the playdoh.  And the Fisher Price city.  And the play kitchen.  And the loft.  And . . .

He was a kid in a candy store.  It took a bit of work to keep him focused on circle time, and on story time, and on anything that prevented him from trying out the next thing that caught his eye.  Some of the other boys would get into little tug-o-wars over certain toys, but D seemed to realize that time spent struggling over toys was time NOT spent playing with toys, so whenever he sensed a possible incursion he just moved on to something else.

I made the mistake of asking him to help me set up for snack — a task Ella had always enjoyed.  It was a mistake because he misinterpreted it to mean that he was about to get to eat snack right that moment, when in fact there was setting out the plates and cups and napkins and then all of story time before it was actually time to eat.  He sat in one of the chairs and loudly called for his snack, and even when he realized it wasn’t going to happen yet he refused to abandon his snack chair to listen to a story.

When they line up to go outside and play at the end of the day, the co-op kid (in this case D) gets to be first in line and decide what they pretend to be when they step through the door.  Not having seen it on the first day he didn’t quite get what was going on or what Mrs. M was asking him to decide, but eventually he got the gist of it — a light went on behind his eyes, and he said bashfully, “Aiwpwane.”  The kids behind him all eagerly extended their arms.  He looked back with a smile of delight, stuck his arms out, and dashed happily outside.

Ella:

Back when she started school in August, it seemed to good to be true that she should fall into the routines so easily, with no tears at the door, no anxiety about all the crowded hallways and the noise, no complaints.  And, as it turned out, it was.  That damnable week and a half she lost to sickness threw her out of the loop a bit, and when she came back things were harder.  She’s been hesitant in the morning. sometimes with tears at the door to the school, though each day after a bit of that she takes a breath, straightens, and purposefully strides through the doors with a grim determination that still brings a lump to my throat.  And at the end of the day she’s always perky and delighted to see D and me again.

In between, though, a couple things have been causing her stress, and are the cause of her early-morning jitters.  (Communicating with a five-year-old is a delicate affair; I present now what took a couple weeks of clues dropped here and there and comparing notes with her teacher to sort it all out.)  First is the cafeteria — crowded and noisy and not, in Ella’s mind, a fun place to eat.  The second is one kid in her class who has been acting out in rather extreme fashion, enough so that the assistant principal has made regular visits to her class to help deal with him.  This latter bit has been the cause of my first Irate Parent Letter, written to the assistant principal.  We’ll see how it all plays out before I write more about it, but I must confess I took a certain writerly pleasure in composing a well-honed IPL, striking the right balance between parental concern, empathy for the plight of the administration, and a stern call for action.  We’ll see how that all develops.

Meantimes her teacher has been very helpful through it all; I suspect she has taken a particular liking to Ella.  Dom and I are going to make a point of joining her for lunch in the cafeteria every once in a while, and hopefully these things will work themselves out.  When I step back and think about it all the only really surprising thing is that all of this wasn’t going on with her those first couple weeks of school, before she got sick.

Oh, and she now knows the months of the year better in Spanish than she does in English, and is a little disappointed when there’s not a worksheet in her folder for her to do at home after school.  She loves Library on Fridays and prefers Art (Tuesday) to Music (Wednesday), though she likes them both much better than Gym (Monday and Thursday).  And even when she’s dragging her feet at little, the leisurely walk the three of us take down the street to school every morning, now that the weather is cooling, remains a perfect way to start the day.