dynamic elf

SCENE: Two five-year-old girls are walking barefoot and hand-in-hand down a forest path. Natalie is holding a big foam sword in her other hand. I am walking by and eavesdropping from another path.

N: You don't need to be scared! I have THIS! *brandishes sword mightily*
S: ...Is that sword made of plastic?

I love this combination of adventure and skepticism. Neither seemed fazed; it's not like the fact that the sword was a toy stopped it from being their weapon against, you know, whatever they might find.


Later, S (who is not the usual five-year-old S, but rather concrete and entrope's little one) was locked in EPIC MUD BATTLE with N. They were in bathing suits and underwear and covered in splotches of mud and smiling almost-unbearably-huge smiles. It is a tragedy that my camera is still not working, because this might have been the most wonderful thing I've seen in months.


They're all growing up. It's wonderful and difficult and strange; five years ago, I was nursing a baby. Five years from now, she probably won't clamor to sleep in bed with me all night. Right now, I think that she loves nothing so much as independence and adventure, as long as she can still give her mom and dad big muddy hugs while she's doing it.

     

( what it's like to take a walk with Natalie )

Real Live Preacher on doing something for the last time.

N's first day of School was today.



It's so school-y. Look: a world map on the wall. Tiny little institutional chairs. Shelves with books and puzzles. An alphabet floor map and a teacher in sensible shoes. A chalkboard. In the hallway, she has a yellow half-height metal locker, and across the way is a dimly-lit echoey tile bathroom with short toilets and short sinks that just screams ELEMENTARY SCHOOL! from every corner.

In that photo, she's drawing a tree in brown marker. It has roots, and squiggly forking organic lines for branches. When we left, she was putting leaves on the tree with a green marker. This weekend, at regyt and novalis's wedding, she drew a picture of a pear on an index card. My baby! Old enough for self-directed representational art!

Across the table from her up there is a girl who also doesn't speak French at home. I've already forgotten her name, and her mom's name. I guess I'm like that. Her mom, though -- I introduced myself, because she had a big SLR camera and a nonstandard lens, and was taking a few pictures with it. She had that body language that said "I'm good at this, but I'm not taking 1000 pictures and I'm not going to be all camera-y at you." She had curly ponytailed hair and crinkly smiley eyes and I didn't hate her. She asked Natalie's name, and then introduced her to her daughter, and said, "you two will be learning French together." Yes, I guess they will.

The school was a lot whiter than I'm used to, but not entirely so, which helped me relax a bit. There were lots of different languages and accents in the hallways, too -- English and French and even Spanish. She clung to me for a while but eventually sat down and got absorbed in drawing her tree and then barely noticed when we left.

( Doesn't she still look like this? )

I'm sitting here in my chair at work practically vibrating. I want the end of the day to come and I want to go pick her up and hear about everything right now. I'll wait, though; the end of the day will come soon enough, and then the end of the week, and the month. Will she start speaking French at home, to me? To dilletante? How long until she corrects my usage?

(How long until she doesn't want snuggles first thing in the morning?)

((I hope she's okay. I admit that a tiny part of me hopes it's a little hard AND a little good today, so that I can snuggle her and comfort her and share the excitement with her.))

My baby! So big. Not a baby at all, really. When does that part sink in?

Reasons I feel like a good parent:

• N's preschool teachers keep asking things like "...did she just go to Amsterdam?" and "did you guys eat chocolate noses yesterday?" and I get to say "Oh, yup! That really happened."
  
• Today I got asked by a green knight, "Mommy, if I wanted to find a squire, where should I look?" When I suggested the home of the stuffed animals in the living room, she replied, "Oh, THANK you, Squire Mommy!"
  
• She can pick words out of songs in French, all of a sudden: "Mommy, what's this song about?" "Hmm, I don't remember. Let's listen." "She just said oiseau and I think that's how we say 'bird' in French. I think it's a song about birds."
  
• I have a kid who will ask for a birthday with "pretend noses", perhaps in part because she knows I will try to give them to her. And -- I did.
  
• Recently I went up to snuggle N in her bed one evening when it sounded like she was having a bad dream. She wrapped an arm around my neck and mumbled, "we'll be friends forever and ever." Granted, it was a quote from a book, but some days half the stuff out of her mouth is quotes from books, so I think I still get to count it as sweet.
  
• She couldn't have been more excited to go to the Somerville Library today and get a library card. (Previously, we'd only gotten out library books from the French library.)
  
• I'm pretty sure that I usually talk to her like a real person who thinks real thoughts. When she gives me a choice, such as "would you like to read books to me on the bed, or on my Dora couch?", I try to give the options real consideration and thoughtfully choose an answer, since, really, it was nice of her to give me a choice in the matter. :)
  
• Here was her Halloween costume: ( mini-astronaut! )

Reasons I feel like a bad parent:

• I'm messy and forgetful. Like, SUPER-messy and SUPER-forgetful. It's often hard for me to remember that she wants a glass of milk long enough to get her a glass of milk, especially if there is anything else going on. (I do, at least, manage to pick her up from preschool every day without being late; this genuinely feels like a miracle to me.)
  
• I know that she needs warnings about what's going to happen and when -- even the most adventurous spirit needs to know what the plan is, before changing it. And yet I often fail to listen, or take her feelings into account when I know the plan is going to be unusual. She reacts accordingly. Even when she reacts very gracefully for a three-year-old (which is not uncommon!), I sometimes get frustrated with her hurt feelings. Later, when I've had half a moment to reflect, this makes me feel like crap.
  
• Sometimes I really want nothing more than to take overnight me-time away from her.
  
• (I feel extremely guilty about taking overnight me-time away from her.)
  
• I sort of overcompensate for feeling like a basically boring at-home caretaker by super-filling our time together with ADVENTURES! and WILD THINGS! when I secretly suspect that really she just wants to have a nice dinner at a normal table with a regular mommy who's eating the same thing she does, then take a bath, and then have books in bed.
  
• Today, I don't actually remember the last time she ate something green. I made baked mac and cheese for dinner, and she ate that, some yogurt, a bit of colby jack, and a glass of milk. (I kid you not.) At least it wasn't her desired meal: leftover cake, which was actually also her breakfast. Luckily, there's only one piece left.
  
• When she woke up on her birthday morning, I was NOT IN THE HOUSE. Later, when she saw me and we read a book together for her naptime, she said to me, "I'm really glad you could see me today."
  
• Sometimes she yells at wee S. that she NEEDS SPACE!!! when S. is just coming down to say hello and it breaks my heart to see S's face. Apparently, no amount of talking about how that kind of yelling hurts S's feelings and couldn't we find a nicer way to talk about being alone? will actually sink in. I'm sure it will eventually but for now I'm just sad about it.
  
• Even though she potty-trained herself quickly, at ~25 months, in a bizarrely dream-like week where apparently she just up and decided she should pee and poop on the toilet all the time and was suddenly dry at night by the end of it, I admit: even though I should thank the heavens for how easy that was, in reality I'm kind of annoyed that I still have to wipe her butt clean. Seriously! It's been almost a year, can't she do it by herself yet?
  
• She likes her preschool well enough, but I often wonder if I should be seeking out the most precisely tailor-engineered learning environment to help her bloom and grow into the perfect wonderful adult human she really wants to be, rather than just sending her to the one at the end of our block.

It's an eternal and unforgiving balancing act between things that make me feel great and things that make me feel like crap. I'm not sure, but I'm beginning to suspect that it will always be like that: the things themselves will change, but the balancing part won't.

Here we are, though: three years in as of yesterday and I just can't believe how articulate, fun, and thoughtful this kid is. She tells me jokes that make me genuinely laugh. She's silly and goofy and polite to strangers. She sings herself to sleep and likes to turn the light on and stay up reading, stealthily. When I pick her up at the end of the day, she often drops whatever she's doing and yells, "MOMMY!" and run-tackle-hugs me like going home is the best thing she could imagine. I think -- today, I think, that despite the mess, that means I'm doing okay.

Happy third birthday, kid. I love you like fire on fire.

I've been delaying writing the Natalie language update for long enough that she's gone through several distinct stages while I've been putting it off.

( a few back notes mostly for myself about stuff she did )

A month or two ago, she started experimenting with shortening words to see what we'd understand. This led to a lot of utterances like "MAH KERREH! MAH KERREH! That means 'mommy I want you to carry me'. MAH KERREH!" Anyway, she does that a lot, still -- she'll say something inscrutable and short, and I'll have to ask her what it means, and she'll patiently explain it to me and then repeat the short form. It's pretty playful -- I mean, it has to be. I've gotten pretty comfortable with the world where I understand everything she says without even trying, so when she tries to make it harder for me I don't have to work hard to play dumb. Really, if any of my peers said the weird truncated things she says, I would also be confused. It usually goes like this:

N: I wah my shor.
Me: ...what?
N: I want my shorts. I wah my shor.
Me: Um, okay, here are your shorts.

Often, when I pick her up at the end of the day, I will get a cute little anecdote from one of the teachers that amounts to "Natalie said something situationally and socially appropriate". Friday's, for example, was this: "Natalie was swinging a toy around and accidentally bonked someone, so she stopped swinging it and said, 'Oh, I'm sorry! Oh, did I hit you? I'm really sorry!'" So, I mean, I laugh, because it's cute, but why is it cute that she knew what to say? It's the same thing when I say "ouch, that really hurt!" when I stub my toe or whatever and she gets that superconcerned face and says, soothingly, "I know, mommy, I know. I know. It'll be okay."

There's a big balancing act in here -- right now, one of my biggest parenting challenges is figuring out how to expect the right amount from her. She can sound older than she is, so I have to remember that she can't really, say, follow a logical chain of reasoning several steps down the line before speaking. Her attention span is definitely that of a 2-year-old. She likes running around and banging stuff and shrieking and talking about poop. But on the other hand, as dilletante was saying to me last night, we like expecting a lot of her, because she so often lives up to our expectations, and if we didn't give her room to do that, then she wouldn't have the chance.

Now, the reason I started posting in the first place, which at this point might be a little anticlimactic! A thing that we've actually been trying to get her to do is be more explicit in her descriptions of stuff, because this conversation gets old after try #100:

N: What's that?
Me: What?
N: That! What's that?
Me: Which thing do you want to know about?
N: THAT thing!

And, slowly, she has been getting it. It's wonderful to watch her refine her descriptions. Now, when you ask 'which thing', she will usually say something like 'the white thing on the counter over there'. She gets ( this expression ) on her face, which looks for all the world like how I feel when I'm trying to express something complicated in a language I don't speak very well. And that must be EXACTLY WHAT SHE IS FEELING! Which is awesome.

But the best thing of all to hear is when she searches and searches and can't come up with a circumlocution or anything and has to just use the best-fit word available to her at the time. Two things she said to me this weekend while I was carrying her:

"Your face isn't round, mommy. It's more ... .... SHAPED."

and

"It feels like rain. The sky is grey and the air is... ... the air is heavy."

It didn't rain that night, but it DID feel like rain, and if I could have I would have opened up the heavens myself to pour rain down on us right that instant.

Yesterday, Natalie went to bed at 4:30 PM, professing that she was going to bed for the night. From 8ish - 10ish, she lay more or less quietly in her bed awake, except for a couple of emergency cuddles and trips to the bathroom. At 8 AM, she woke up and asked to go upstairs; when we said she should sleep a minute more (hey, we're like that), she closed her eyes and didn't move again until 8:50. Upon waking, she ate three containers of yogurt, a bunch of steak, and a piece of toast with butter ("Mommy, what does toast want on it?" "Butter, usually." "Then I would like my toast with butter on it, please."). Now, she is running in circles and playing lots of pretend games about FOOD.

I think we're going to need to buy new clothes, soon.