As Nate mentioned in the previous post, Ella loves singing. She also loves acting out the things she sees on the DVDs she watches. Last week, she was in the tub playing and said, “Hi, I’m Dora.” This, of course, was my cue to say, “Hi, Dora, I’m Boots.” She then hatched a quick plan to go to the library, but to find our way, we had to consult the map. So she turned around and directed me to get the map out of her backpack. I took it out, and then we had to ask the map where the library was. I had to double as the map and come up with some directions, so I said we had to go around the lake, through the butterfly garden, and up the hill to the library. (Fortunately, I’ve seen enough Dora episodes to come up with some stock map parts.)
We started walking toward the lake, and then Ella turned her head to the side and mumbled a few words from a song into her shoulder. She then looked straight at me and said, “I hear the singing gate.” I didn’t understand immediately, but after repeating this sequence a few more times and always turning her head to her shoulder, I realized she was trying to secretly impersonate the gate.
As Nate mentioned, this has now become the activity of the week — occurring even more frequently than the “Momma, you kitty” commands. The most frequent scenario is in her bedroom with the blue chair doubling as the gate. Thursday night she spent a half hour trying various keys in the gate, and then concluding that she needed to use some tape to fix it — all these items, by the way, are mimed and located in her closet. When she wasn’t satisfied with my participation level, she demanded that I get her the key that was located up high in her closet.
I tried to convince her that we needed to fix the gate by helping him figure out the lyrics to songs — this is the scenario on Dora. However, she didn’t like doing that. While she loves singing songs, she doesn’t like singing along with anyone. She likes to sing solos and demand them of those around her.
