Modern Girl

Elena has been loving imaginary play. Today when she was upset and cranky from not sleeping since she's been sick, I knew that Garin (the stuffed monkey) and Gorilla would be able to talk her into playing with them instead of crying. So we had a four way hug and went into my room, found and emptied a cardboard box, and we were set to go. (Thanks to all our online shopping, we ALWAYS have cardboard boxes around.) So, I put the box on the floor and put the animals in.

Me: This is their house.
ER: (grinning now) Oh, is there a TV in the house?
Me: Of course. (I took an imaginary TV and put it in the house.)
ER: What about the remote?
Me: Oh sure! (another imaginary object went in)

We continued to furnish the house with imaginary objects. I just cracked up about the "remote" since....ok...here come the mothballs and cobwebs...I remember our old TV when I was a kid that had a tuner like an old radio dial. My Papa used to yell for me as a little pipsqueak to come tune in Channel 7 for him, since he didn't have the patience to fiddle with the brown dial with the gold letters and red needle to get it to come in.

Then I remember our first color TV and the NBC peacock.

Anyhow, it is the 21st century, and Elena's imaginary TVs have remotes.

Favourite letters

Elena has taken to calling "E" her favourite letter. Today, as we were about to sound out the word "pets," she pointed to the "e" and said "That's my favourite letter." She then pointed to the "s" and said, "That's YOUR favourite letter, Mama. /s/ for Serena." She wants Uncle Steven to have a favourite letter, too, but isn't sure what it is...

A budding mathematician

Me: Are you ready for bed yet?
ER: No
Me: What do you need to do before you're ready for bed then?
ER: Can you please play catch with me?
Me: You need to play catch first, and then you'll be ready to go to bed?
ER: Yeah.

So off we went to her room to play catch with her tennis ball. I discovered that she's become pretty good, with a decent overhand throw. Mama came in and joined and naturally we started passing the ball in a triangle. I started a counting game wherein each of us would count off the next number in sequence as we caught the ball in turn, as such:

Me: One
Mama: Two
ER: Three
Me: Four
Mama: Five
ER: Six
... (Elena kept this up successfully)
ER: Eighteen
Me: Nineteen
Mama: Twenty
ER: Eleventeen

...
Me: That's very good Elena! Good extrapolation! It's not quite correct, but good reasoning nonetheless. Full marks!

Writing her name

Yesterday, Elena spontaneously got paper and an orange highlighter and said "I will write my name." She then wrote "ELE" but got stuck on the last two letters. I should take a picture of it to add to this post...

She gets the caution from Erich

I was traveling in the car with my mother and Elena on our way to church. As usual, my mother and I were talking. Elena became a tad agitated, saying, "Stop! Stop that!"
"Stop what, Elena?"
"Stop talking!"
When we queried further, she explained very clearly that talking while driving was "dangerous." She has also expressed concern about taking curves too quickly being "dangerous."

I hope this means that she'll be a safe driver instead of an agoraphobe.

better than the man on the street

I got Elena a small stuffed gorilla. So of course we had to look up gorillas on the National Geographic website for kids. We got to see pictures of gorillas, lots of info I read to her, a cool video of mountain gorillas in the wild, and an audio recording of live gorillas. In the meantime some random picture of Obama came across the computer screen while we were looking things up. She saw this small picture, stared at it closely, and said, "That's Barack Obama. He's the President!" Later Serena asked her where he was and she said, "Washington."

Overheard in the kitchen today...

"When I was a baby I had breastmilk. But now I'm not a baby, I have regular food. I have mangoes and berries."

I'm assuming she got the idea that babies consume "breastmilk" from my mother, because I don't think I've ever talked about nursing in those terms.

Putting sounds together

For a good while now, Elena has been able to tell us the sounds that a number of letters make. But whenever I would try to put together some of the letters she knows into a word, she was completely uninterested. I told myself not to push it, that she would be interested in it when she was ready to learn it and I should just wait it out.

She is now showing interest. Saturday morning, she brought me an alphabet book and wanted me to sound out all the words with her, letter by letter. This morning (I'm home due to a federal holiday), Elena wanted to do some letter work while eating her morning mango. I wrote a word ("CAT") and said that if she could figure out what the secret message was, I would draw it for her. I asked her what sound each letter made, and she told me without difficulty (She knows those three letters well). In general, she can get to this point, but she still has difficulty putting the sounds together into a word. But today when I asked her to put it together, she said, "Cat! But I wanted a dog..."

We then got out the sandpaper letters and did some other "-at" words. The only other one that she was able to put together into a word by herself was "bat," but she still enjoyed the process with "mat" and "pat." But soon she requested to switch activities to trace letters in the sand, so we did that for a bit as well.

Also, as a related sidenote, Elena has taken ownership of the letter "E." Now, when she sees it places, she says "That's my letter!" I ask, "Why is that your letter?" She answers "It's /e/ for ehhh-lena!"