Cerin Amroth

I posted quite a few pictures from the trip that Nate, Ella, and I took to the cabins in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We’ve gone to Blaney Park for more than a decade (possibly 13 years total, although we missed a few) with a group of friends from college. In past years, we’ve always left the kids in the Lower P with their grandparents – partly to give them a chance for undivided grandparent attention, but also to give us child-free time with our friends.

This year, we decided Ella was old enough to bring with us. I was still a little worried that she would stick to us like glue. After the first few hours, though, she fit right in with all the other kids – all but one of whom are cousins, so that’s quite an accomplishment. She had great fun playing games, riding in boats, reading books, making crafts, participating in a LARP (live action role playing), interacting with our adult friends, and just generally goofing around.

Nate went to the cabins for the whole week, and Ella and I headed up on Tuesday, after spending time with my family. She was very sad about leaving her cousins and Dom behind, but we had a great car trip together – singing songs, talking, and taking a break to take pictures at the bridge. After being at the cabins for only a few hours, she said to me, “I really like it up here at the cabins.” As Nate wrote, she was both sad and happy to leave. A very successful trip, indeed.

As Nate is fond of reminding me, I am woefully behind in editing and posting photos, so here’s the first batch. It includes 1) Ella’s preschool graduation; 2) my birthday party; 3) Ella and Dom’s first attempt at bowling; and 4) pictures from the first part of our MI trip – camping with my family. I promise more to come in the next week.

Tonight we may have discovered the secret to getting Ella to agree to talk on the phone. We were doing Skype with MarMar (that’s my family’s term for Grandma) Steeby, but her sound was not working. After a failed fix-it attempt, I ended up adding the sound via my cell phone’s speaker.

After a while, the echo effect became too much, so I shut the speaker phone off. At the same time, Dom wanted my attention, so I handed the phone to Ella to talk. Surprisingly, she didn’t object, but started in on the conversation. Mind you, it was mostly my Mom talking, but Ella did listen and say a few things.

I took the phone a little later to ask Mom a question and then shut off Skype and proceeded upstairs – still talking. Ella objected immediately and said she still wanted to talk. After I was done, I handed the phone back to her, and she said a few more words.

Who knows, maybe we’re on to something new.

Dominic has moved into a new sort of talking phase.  He left caveman-speech behind a little while ago; now he is at the point where wants to try to use words All.  The.  Time.

So when Ella says something, he will repeat it exactly.  And any time he’s introduced to a new word he’ll repeat it, often with painful deliberation.  (It took him over ten seconds to say “hippopotamus” tonight, but he wasn’t going to stop until he had hit every single syllable.)  And he has started self narrating.  If he’s going down the stairs and he sees his mother he’ll say “Mommy!  I go down stayuhz!”  But I’ve also caught him doing the same thing when he doesn’t think anyone else is watching:  “I get mah trains.  I go up stayhuz and get trains.  Fast!”

All this is wonderful.  And yet the very same child refuses to eat frozen custard at the Dairy Godmother, instead preferring a plain ice cream cone.  Go figure.

A year and a half ago we spent two weeks away from both of our children, but I think maybe this past week was harder for them, when Dominic and Ella spent four days apart from each other — Ella with us and many of our friends and their kids in the UP, Dominic down south with one pair of grandparents and then the other.

It was great fun to take Ella up to see the Cabins for the first time.  Her initial bout of shyness didn’t last that long, though I could see her flitting back and forth between interacting with the other kids and then retreating to play by herself when it got a little much for her.  But there she was, playing games and riding in rowboats and running around outside and doing all the things that we imagined the kids we’d have someday would do up there when we idly talked about it a dozen years ago.  But not a day went by when she didn’t mention her brother, and how she missed him.  When we were getting ready to leave she explained to me that it was a happy-and-sad time, because she was sad to be leaving the Cabins but happy that she would see her brother again soon.

Though he had a grand time first with one set of grandparents and then the other, Dominic seems to have had the harder go of it.  Though more outgoing than his sister he’s of an age where maintaining routine matters a little more.  I’m writing this from a hotel room halfway home to Alexandria, where he suffered a late-night meltdown because we had yogurt drink instead of milk for him to drink before he fell asleep.  And though it was “mommy” and “daddy” that he cried for sometimes when we were gone, I think of Ella had been there he probably wouldn’t have noticed so much.

At any rate their reunion was touching.  Ella had picked out a balloon to present to him when we arrived, and thrust it into his hands as soon as they met.  He seemed to understand the gesture and didn’t let go of the balloon once through all the assorted hugs and kisses that followed.  That night they slept on adjoining mattresses, each on the side of their mattress closest to the other.  Ella’s limbs were splayed but one hand rested assuredly on Dominic’s arm.