“Daddy!” Ella exclaimed, after she had decided that she wasn’t going to eat any more of her soup. “The swimming pool is open!”
She was referring to the one by our friends’ Nick and Jen’s house, where we went a couple times last summer, and which, we had had to explain to her recently, wasn’t going to be open again for several weeks.
“OK,” she continued, “Here’s the plan: you get the diapers, mama will get the swimming suis, and I’ll get the towels.”
“How many towels will we need?” I asked.
She paused, thought, and did some counting on her fingers. “Five,” she said decisively.
“Close,” I thought to myself. “Let’s count it out,” I said out loud, a little patronizingly, holding up my fingers. “One for me, two for mama, three for Ella, four for Dominic. That makes four.”
“No, Daddy,” she said patiently. “Dominic doesn’t need a towel, he’s going to stay in his car seat. And Nick and Jen need towels. That makes five.”
So it does, so it does.
She hopped down off her chair, and when I saw her next she was out of her clothes and trying to wriggle into her swimsuit. She reminded me that I needed to get the diapers, because we were going soon.
And therein lies an interesting challenge with Ella these days: do I play along? Because if we are pretending to go to the pool, then there’s no harm in gathering some stuff up and making believe the pool is in the middle of the living room or something. But if she has managed to convince herself that we are, in fact, going to be going to the swimming pool, then it’s only going to end in tears. And figuring out just what side of reality she happens to be on, any given moment, can be pretty tricky these days.
