Cerin Amroth

“Daddy! I made a poopy!”

“Thank you for telling me, Ella! Great job! Let’s go change your diaper.”

“It’s a BIG one.”

“Oh . . .”

“It’s gonna be STINKY!”

A simple “I have a poopy” would have sufficed, but hey, we’ll take what we can get.

Just now I overheard Ella counting to herself. She made it all the way to six, then skipped to eight and nine.

“Very good counting, Ella,” I said. “How high can you count?”

“One hunred,” she replied, matter of factly.

I laughed. “Really? Let’s hear it.”

“One. Two. Free. One hunred.”

I laughed again, but she didn’t get the joke — she was perfect certain that she had just successfully counted to a hundred, and didn’t get what the big deal was.

Ella’s signature phrase these days is “Let’s Play!” Play, in this context, has a fairly specific meaning — it’s not just “doing stuff with toys,” but involves play-acting with Little People, stuffed animals, or “inanimate objects”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/archives/2006/01/everything_talk.html. She may or may not take the role of one or more of these characters, but I’m always expected to take on a role or three. This sort of thing has been going on for a while, but the breadth of her dialogue in conversation, and her inventiveness in imagining scenes and situations, surprise me anew every day.

“No daddy — let’s PLAY!” is a frequent to response to my frequent question, “Ella, would you like to read a book?” She would much rather enact than read, at this point. And while she’ll happily sit still for a book or three before a nap or bedtime, at other times during the day, when she _is_ in the mood for reading, she’ll insist on doing it by herself:

“Ella, let’s read this book!”

“OK!” she says. I start reading it.

“NO Daddy!” She snatches it away from me. “I want to read it all by myself!” Sometimes she’ll grab another book to hand to me so that I’ll have something to do. Then, in order to make sure that I don’t even _try_ to read hers out loud over her shoulder, she’ll sit facing me and hold the book up high so that she can’t even see me.

A more recent development on the “let’s play” front is having her toys take on roles themselves. That is to say, Ella will walk up to me and say brightly “I Dora!” Then she’ll hold up her Curious George doll. “And this is my friend Boots!”

“Boots? Isn’t that George?” I asked the first time.

Ella leaned in and explained, rather patiently, “Daddy, George is _petending_ to be Boots.”

Her belated 2 year doctor’s appointment put her in the 70’s for height and weight, and in fine health overall. It doesn’t seem at all right that her next well visit isn’t for another year. I mean, they actually trust us with her for that long without any sort of checkup?! Crazy.

At the appointment we discussed potty training strategies, but with Ella I think it’s going to be a little while longer. The potty chair sits in the corner and when we raise the issue of making poopies on the toilet, she knows perfectly well what we’re talking about, and has, at the moment, absolutely zero interest in participating. And so we are patient.

Ella has had only a couple of Time Outs so far — enough that she knows exactly what they are, though. The power implicit in them is terrifying. Yesterday I sat her down on a chair after she threw food from her tray all over the floor. I explained that she was having a time out because she had misbehaved, and I watched her face fall into utter despair as I told her she’d have to sit here quietly for five minutes. When five minutes were up I had her tell me what she had done wrong, and then told her Time Out was over, and her face lit up and she leaped into my arms and said “I love you, Daddy!” And all I could think about was how easy it would be to jerk her around by her behavioral chain, and what a scary responsibility that sort of power entails.

Her hair is now long enough to start bothering her — she’s frequently brushing it out of her eyes, and often says “Hey! Don’t mess with my hair!” But she’s adamantly opposed to barettes every time I raise the possibility of putting one on. That’ll change soon, I suspect.

On the book front, Ella’s tastes are diffuse, though she’s a current fan of the Madeline compendium she got for Christmas. When it comes to watching DVDs, Dora and Blue still hold special places in her heart, but (thanks to Aunt Sarah) Peep currently holds equal status. I’ll have to write up a kids’ TV survey one of these days, but suffice it to say for now that I’m sick to death of Dora, continue to be surprisingly pleased by Blue’s Clues, and am absolutely floored by “Peep and the Big Wide World”:http://www.peepandthebigwideworld.com/. Terrific stuff.

Slowly but surely, Ella’s getting more confident talking in front of other people. And every once in a while she’ll do something totally out of character, like when she bounded into the coffee shop last week in order to show a friend of mine the animal stickers on the jungle picture she had just made at story time. She proudly pointed at and named each of the animals, and both he and I were flabbergasted — me because Ella was being so forward, and he because he had idea she could talk so much.

There’s plenty more to say, but Ella is currently yanking the eraser off of a mechanical pencil with her teeth while watching me out of the corner of her eye to gauge my reaction. It was simpler when she slept more and just cried when she wanted attention, of course. But this is a heck of a lot more fun.