Yesterday, Ella and I were playing with her Legos — the slightly oversized ones that are between Duplos and regular Legos. She took a flat 4×2 and put a fat 2×2 on top of it, and another fat 2×2 on top of that. Then she moved it back and forth in the air, going “Vvvvvvssssshh.” I was distracted with the my own building project, so I didn’t notice at first.
“Daaaaa!”
“Yes, Ella?”
“Vvvvsssshhh.” She moved it around again.
“What’s that?”
“A-pane!” she replied triumphantly.
“Elanora, _no_!”
I know perfectly well that these words don’t mean a heck of a lot to her — that, developmentally speaking, she doesn’t yet understand forbidden behavior, only that her will is being thwarted. Nevertheless, they get said a lot. Like just now, when I saw her standing on her tippy toes near my desk, straining to reach the camera.
She looked back over her shoulder, and I could see the calculations going on behind her eyes. “Daddy doesn’t want me to touch the camera, so I won’t” was nowhere to be found. Instead it was more like “I have a limited window of time in which to mess with the camera before he takes it away from me. And he seems a little tired now, so I bet if I try to do it nonchalantly he’ll let it slide.”
“OH-kaaay,” Ella says sweetly, even as she gets a hold of the camera and yanks it down to the floor. She turns it around in her hands, trying to be casual about it, but watches me out of the corner of her eye to see what I’m going to do. When she sees me stand up, she leaps into action, and tries more or less simultaneously to take off the lens cap, open up the viewer window in the back, and press the buttons on the top. She doesn’t get very far before I’ve taken the camera and put it high up on the bookshelf.
Not one to miss a beat, she gets up and goes over to the shelf with all the games. Before I can even contemplate scolding her about the business with the camera, she points to the backgammon board and says “Play baaaak?”
Who am I to say no?
It’s funny and perhaps a bit frightening when your child begins parrotting back to you the things you say to her. Nate and I are quick to offer kisses for Ella’s bumps and scratches. Now she does the same to us whenever we have an injury. A little over a week ago, I burned my arm while making quesidillas. When Ella saw the burn the next morning at breakfast, she puckered up her lips and made a smooching sound. Then came the icing on the cake. She said, most sincerely, “All Beh.”
The next example came the other morning while I was folding the laundry. I pulled her pair of bloomers out of the laundry basket and discovered that it had holes in it. Without even realizing it, I said “Uh oh.” Ella immediately patted me on the hand and said “don worr, Mama” – translated “don’t worry.” I felt both comforted and patronized at the same time.
And in the category of parrotting behavior, she was standing at the futon last night playing with her books and the GPS device, which is about the size of a cell phone. She picked up a book in one hand and had the device in the other. She held the device directly up to the book for a few seconds, and then did it with the next book in the stack. She did this with her 4 Maisy books for a good 10 minutes, “scanning” each book multiple times. That’s when I realized that she was probably imitating the motion she saw Nate do at the library on Monday when he used the self check-out station to check her books out. I even realized that she was holding the device on the book for about the same 30 seconds it takes for the scanner to register the barcode. I watched carefully to see if she was holding the GPS device exactly over the barcode of the Maisy books. She wasn’t quite this particular about her imitation, but I think that’s definitely what she was doing.
We’re realizing that while Ella is learning how to say more and more things, sometimes she doesn’t quite get the meaning. “Too hot” seems to be the only descriptor she uses for food. I give her something directly out of the fridge, and she’ll say “too hot” and blow on it. I’m quite sure she means “too cold,” but then she still tries to remedy the situation by blowing on it. She also seems to use “too big” as the consistent descriptor for clothes, even when she means “too small.” At this stage, it all seems to be about context.
Well, she’s started calling me Nate. That is to say, when she hears Suanna calling me Nate, she’ll call out to me, and instead of saying “Daaaa, Daaaa,” she’ll say “Naaaay, Naaaay,” all the while with this impish grin on her face because she _knows_ she’s being funny.
Her trip to Canada went wonderfully — according to Suanna, she was a little bit of a handful on the flight up but a perfect angel on the way back. For about a week afterwards “Go pane?” was a frequent question; only recently has she accepted that she’s not going to be riding on a plane again any time soon. She still perks up every time she hears a plane in the sky, and can usually spot them up there before I can. She also has an uncanny ability to detect any VW bug within a quarter mile of her location. She spots them driving by, or parked as we whiz by, or from across a huge parking lot. “Na car!” she’ll yell, because of Nana’s yellow VW. I find it interesting that all bugs are Na cars, not all bright yellow cars.
Ella’s obsession with the alphabet song continues, but the one she has down even better is “Rain, Rain, Go Away.” Here’s the way I sing it:
Rain, rain, go away
Come again another day
Elanora wants to play
Rain, rain, go away
And here’s Ella’s rendition:
Ray, ray, gah a way
Cahn ah day
Eh ah noh wahn pay
Raaay raay
She sings this _a lot_, with no apparent connection to the actual weather. And she asks me to sing it almost as much, which has led me to improvise a number of alternate memories in order to avoid being driven insane with the repetition. Some of them are quite stirring, if I do say so myself.
Other favorites: Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes, Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Not surprisingly, these are all songs that get sung at Monday morning Storytime at a bookstore in Alexandria we go to.
Storytime is a good thumbnail for the great divide between Ella’s public and private personae. We get there and sit on the floor amid a sea of other toddlers and their parents or nannies. She sits firmly on my lap, and doesn’t move around until towards the end when she needs to stand up and stretch her legs. She watches and listens attentively the whole time, very rarely losing focus or becoming distracted, but she doesn’t say a thing, doesn’t sing along, or do any of the gestures. It’s not until she’s in her car seat and we’re on the way home that she wants to sing all the songs and do all the gestures that she can remember.
I sometimes get frustrated by her public shyness — not because I’m worried about it or anything, but because it means that relatively few people get to see her really in her element. On any given day she’s cracking me up pretty much continuously, but to most people she just seems really cute and really quiet.
I don’t have hard numbers at the moment about her growth, but she has definitely gained a lot of height since her 18 month appointment. Probably a little weight too, though she’s as picky as ever — not much of an eater. Her sleep schedule is pretty much the same — 8:30 to 6:00 or 6:30. She still takes two naps — when we try to get her to take one big nap in the middle of the day, by keeping her up in the morning, she still wants a second nap late in the day.
There are many, many pictures to share, from trips to Michigan and Canada, as soon as I can get them sorted and captioned and resized. Hopefully tomorrow.
