Cerin Amroth

Ella and I were sitting at the table finishing up dinner, and Nate was in the bedroom.

“So, how was your day at work, Momma.”

“It was good, Ella.”

“Nate,” Ella yelled while looking toward the bedroom. She has the cute habit of putting her hand infront of her mouth when she yells, rather than cupping her hands around her mouth. Nate says that she only calls him by his first name around me. “How was your good day?” — she wasn’t giving him the choice of good, bad, or indifferent.

Nate didn’t answer, so she yelled again, “Daddy, how was your good day?”

She likes asking this question so much that she even does it first thing in the morning. I try to explain that the day is just beginning, so I don’t know how it will be. I’m not sure that she gets it.

Here’s a sampling of the things Ella has done in the past few days that indicate she’s growing up:

• On Saturday, we went to the pool to go swimming. Unlike previous visits, she spent most of the time in the water (she likes to hang out on the ladder or along the outside). The platform was in the water, so she could stand on it and hold on to the bar. While doing this, she laid back so that her ears were underwater and legs were sticking up. She then leaned forward so that she was laying on her stomach. She even put her face in the water – although it’s tough to say whether that was intentional. She was quite proud of these accomplishments.
• Also at the pool, she now likes to go in the shower by herself. Before, I would have to pick her up and hold her to get her under the flow of water. Now, she likes sitting and laying on the floor to get wet.
• On Sunday, she went to Sunday School for the second time. This time, it was in a room with 3 other kids her age. I walked her down there from the nursery. When I introduced her to the teacher, she started to get clingy, so I worried she wasn’t going to stay. However, when Miss Donna told her about the beans they were going to sort, she walked over to the table and dug right in. When I picked her up, she was eager to tell me about what she did.
• In the tub on Saturday night, she proudly declared (out of the blue), “I have nipples, and it makes me happy.”
• Tonight while reading books before going to sleep, she counted to ten, identified all the pictures correctly, and told me her colors. While she isn’t good with letters, yet, she’s very interested in knowing which letter starts a word, and she can usually correctly identify the letter “E.” We were reading 5 different board books all made by the same manufacturer. Ella quickly saw through their cheap production ploy of using the same pictures in more than one book. When we got to the fish, she paged through the other books until she found the same fish elsewhere. Then the game became finding as many copies as we could.

It’s so fun to watch her grow and imagine how she will soon be trying to teach her brother all these things.

Ella is still getting a handle on certain aspects of chronology.  She currently uses “yesterday,” “last week,” and “last month” pretty much interchangeably, throwing one of them into a sentence and then looking to me to check for its validity in the current context.  Explanations of which one means what don’t seem to stick; she’s pretty content to sort it all out through trial and error, which is probably explained by some childhood development theory or another.

This weekend she introduced a new measure of time while we were hanging out in the evening by the river in Old Town.  Her favorite part wasn’t so much looking at the water as it was watching the planes descending toward the airport.  When we told her it was time to go, she replied, “No!  Not yet!  We can go in _two more airplanes_!”

We couldn’t find Pooh today before Ella’s nap.  She was fairly certain he should be in the vicinity of the couch, but he wasn’t there, or anywhere else we looked.  As nonchalantly as I could, I said, “Well, how about you sleep with somebody different today?”  And held my breath.

“OK!” said Ella brightly.  “How about Tiger!”

As I tucked her in it became evident that Tiger was _pretending_ to be Pooh.  But then at the last second Ella changed her mind and wanted LTC and Leroy in the bed with her instead.  In any case, she conked out happily without Pooh, which, if not a first, is pretty darn rare.

Ella’s new favorite word is “actually.”  She loves using it.  I have more than once watched her start a sentence, stop, think, then start a sentence again beginning with “Actually . . .” because she realizes it fits and she wants to squeeze it in there whenever she can.  She takes her time with the word, savoring every syllable, ever-so-proud of herself: “ACK-choo-ah-leeee . . .”

Ella has been saying a doing more and more in the past couple of weeks to acknowledge her coming sibling. Last Sunday, she went to Sunday school for the first time (which requires a separate post). When I came to pick her up, one of the teachers congratulated me on my pregnancy. She said that she asked Ella whether she was going to be a big sister, and Ella proudly answered yes. She asked whether her mom was going to have a boy or a girl, and Ella said, “boy.”

This is the first I had heard of Ella talking about the baby, not just focusing on the affect on her – becoming a big sister. I was also pleased to hear that she answered the question of the baby’s gender correctly. She’s certainly heard enough people talk about a boy or a brother, but she has never acknowledged the baby’s gender.

Yesterday, we were in the car to run some errands, and she started talking about all the things she was going to do with her baby brother. She said they could play Legos together, have a tea party together, and go swimming together. She also said that she could help put on his swimming suit and get him dressed after they went swimming. Finally, she talked about holding his hand when they walk across the street. I cautioned her that he probably wouldn’t be able to play right away, but that he’d be excited to do it when he’s old enough. It was quite a treat to listen to her starting to think about all these things.

Overheard most mornings at the Polytropos household …

“Momma, will you play with me?”

“I’m sorry, Ella, but I need to take a shower right now. Daddy’s awake, so you can ask him.”

“But Momma, aren’t you ‘posed to play with me?” – in an increasingly plaintive voice.

“Ella, I have to get ready for work now.”

“Momma,” both plaintive and insistent, “course you’re ‘posed to play with me!” – sometimes accompanied by a stamp of the foot.

She certainly is a skilled practitioner.