dynamic elf

I forgot about livejournal for a while there. I still love this place. If you've written sometihng interesting, recently, please link me to it in comments; catching up is hard and seems impossible.

So, N is 9. Very 9. 9 all over the place. She has crushes. Her body is starting to change. She's still full of ideas and plans and jokes, but I can see her adult self beginning to poke out here and there; I can't quite say why it makes me teary-eyed, but it does. It's sort of like staring the beauty of the universe straight in the face - I flinch.

It's not that she herself is beautiful (though she is), or that I am nostalgic for when she was littler and I could scoop her up and make the world stop (though I am) - it's that I am beginning to see so clearly the passage of time and the cycles in it. I see that this is who I will be ceding the world to, just as my parents did to me.

She commented recently that she didn't understand "happy tears". Tears, yes! Happiness, of course. Emotions too big to contain, all the time. But she does not get why an excess of happiness makes adults cry. And I'm thinking - when are the times that happiness makes me cry? I think they're all inflection points and times of transition. It's change. Change makes me cry: weddings, divorces, coming-of-age narratives, funerals. Watching someone step into their own power. A child growing up. A friend, drifted away.

And maybe change makes me cry as an adult, but didn't as a kid, because every change has a bit of loss in it, even good ones. And loss changes shape as you get older.

So I don't know. Sometimes, when she asks me a complicated question, I'm able to knock it out of the park. And sometimes I flounder. I'm quite certain I did not manage to convey in any way why adults cry when they're happy sometimes. But I haven't been able to shake the question, either. And I keep coming back to: I don't know, kid, but some day maybe you can figure it out and tell me.

If ever I had any doubt about whether switching schools this year was the right move for my kid, I no longer do.

Last night, at bedtime, she whispered to me about a plan she had. This happens a lot. But last night's plan was a SECRET FRENCH PROJECT! Here's what she reported:

"I want to write a letter to my teacher last year - in French - and say that I am going to New York this weekend on a trip and I hope she's happy. And I would like to put another smaller envelope in that envelope for her class, for all the students in her class, and it will be filled with pieces of paper that say in ENGLISH: 'I love you, and you are great in school.' Or maybe just 'XOXOXO You're great.' Then I want to sneak into the school and leave it in front of her door and sneak away."

This breaks my heart, basically. She continues to work through her difficult experience last year with bursts of insight and grace -- this step is clearly her trying to think about what would have made life better for her, and trying to fix the problem for other people.

That kid. I hope she changes the whole world.

For all that she is a wildly creative and clever kid, Natalie has never had a particular love for naming things. Some time last year, she did start to name her stuffed animals. The dolphin was "Dolphiny". The leopard was "Leopardy". The panther was "Panthery". We knew she was committed to this scheme when she wound up with a new elephant and named it "Elephanty". Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, that one. You have to LOOOOVE consistency and precise articulation to embrace the name Elephanty.

At some point this winter, though, the winds changed: she now has "Beary Bear", and an old fluffy dog has become "Doggy Dog". (Animals named last year appear to retain their old names.) I was waiting to see how long this new scheme would last: was the problem just that "Beary" sounds like "berry", and "doggy" was already a word? Or, if I bought her a stuffed snail, would it become Snaily Snail? Did she even know that she had HAD a system to shift? Only time could tell.

...but not a lot of time. Apparently it was a conscious exploration, because yesterday she asked D if he had noticed that she had changed the way she names things, pointing out both the old scheme and the new. "I change the way I name things every year," she reported, quite seriously.

Personally, I can't wait to be called "mommy mom" and "daddy dad", but D says no. :)

This morning, Natalie requested that when she gets home, we make a bunch of paper airplanes and fly them over her like confetti. She's working on reliably making planes that fly more-or-less straight. I trust that this will serve her well in school.

She has pet frogs. She loves them: she picks them up and talks to them and carries them around, and then they hop under the couch and we dust them off and feed them some crickets. They are named "Sunshine" and "Shade". Frogs frogs frogs.

We're reading all the Roald Dahl books ever, at bedtime these days. Last night, she read me a whole chapter. I keep waiting for the time of "sitting alone and reading all the novels ever" to kick in, but it hasn't yet.

She continues to be surprisingly self-aware. Recently, I was dropping her off for a sleepover, and at the moment she realized I was going to *leave* her there, she freaked out a bit; we went off to sit alone in a corner and chat, and she said, "mommy, I don't know why, but when you and daddy leave, I get really afraid, every time. And it wasn't always like this, and I don't know why it's happening. Why is it happening?" We then sat and traced it back to one particular event this past August, where us being gone was genuinely scary and sad for her. This gave us a handle to talk about how sad that was and why it makes her feel scared, and also to *keep* telling the story of that incident through to the point where it all became okay again. She was happy at the idea of telling the whole story and retraining her brain - when we had condensed the story down to a few sentences, she spoke them in that weird inhaling-voice, saying that that was how she was going to tell her brain that it was all going to be okay. AND THEN IT WAS.

She's also into fashion. I'd like to find a good way to empower her to design and make clothes without having to use a sewing machine, since waiting for me to assist her seems to be a losing proposition. But I bet if she had her own little bin of fabric and scissors, she would do something great. I've loved watching her alter and repurpose her existing clothes.

I'm pretty sure that when I was her age, I knew that clothes existed.

Public school is proving to be pretty wonderful, all in all. The hardest part is how little she gets to run around. They have one recess every day, and some time to run around a bit in the afterschool program, but I think in January we will put her in 2x/week swim lessons, because I *know* she needs more activity than that.

The thing that amazes me, though, is how *funny* she is. She has an *amazing* sense of comic timing, an array of silly voices at her command, and the best "I'm keeping a straight face" impish grin I may have ever seen. I foresee a lot of laughs together.

(obligatory maudlin coda: I feel like there have been so many stories I wanted to tell and haven't posted because my job is hectic. In ten years, I won't care about my job, but I will care about the time Natalie's snail collection escaped inside. I'm going to try to reach back through the last few months of IM conversations and emails and find the best one or two and put them down before they're lost.)

What went wrong for you during elementary school? What went right? What would you change if you could -- or, perhaps more reasonably, what would you do to make sure your (possibly theoretical) child didn't have the same problems? Anonymous commenting is on.

I'll go first. Kindergarten was bad and boring. The teacher didn't believe that I came in to the class already reading, and didn't go out of her way at all to make sure I wasn't bored. Then, they tried to keep me back a year because I couldn't catch a ball (I'm still not awesome at it). My mom fought to have me advance to the first grade, where the teacher was shocked that nobody had suggested I skip a grade since clearly first grade was not where I belonged, either. Mom said no; Mrs D'Errico was fantastic. She managed to keep me engaged just as well as the kids who were just learning to read. Sometimes I got to read the chapter books aloud at storytime, and a few times a week I got to go play math games with a woman who, in retrospect, just came to the school to meet with me, and followed me throughout my whole school career. Huh.

In second grade I spent a lot of time with a new enrichment teacher along with one other kid. We raised ladybugs and wrote books and read about art history and got time on the university mainframe to play Adventure. My classroom teacher was meh. My mom was frustrated beyond all measure that I refused to learn my timestables on principle since I could always do them in my head.

Third grade was a waste and at the end of the year all my friends dumped me.

My fourth grade teacher remains one of my two favorites throughout my entire schooling, but my gym teacher that year spent a lot of time making me feel completely worthless.

What would I change if I could change anything? I would keep my second-grade enrichment teacher throughout kindergarten through, say, fifth grade. I think it would have kept me happier and then all of third grade wouldn't have been such a waste of time. I don't really know, though -- my parents were super supportive both when things were going right and when things were going wrong. I don't have any idea what a *fulfilling* elementary school education would look like.

So, a bunch of you essentially said "I'd tell you my story but I don't want to bore you". Please do. It won't bore me, doubly so if you also have suggestions for things that would have worked *for you*.

Happy halloween!

I have a bunch of little Natalie anecdotes I've been meaning to post, because I've been thinking about her intellectual development, but this one takes the cake so much that it gets its own post.

[Late at night]
N: Mama! Mama!
Me: What's up, sweetie?
N: I'm scared.
Me: Did you have a bad dream?
N: Yes. [*snuggling*]
Me: That's hard. I'm sorry. It's OK, you're here now, and so am I, and it wasn't real.
N: *snuggles more*
Me: What's a nice thing that you'd rather dream about?
N: I want to dream about... NOTHING. I don't want ANY dreams.
Me: What about something nice we did today? Like swimming in the lake or seeing the chickens?
N: OK. .....No. I want to dream about astronauts.
Me: OK.

[She falls asleep and snores soundly all night. In the morning, she crawls into my bed.]

Me: Good morning. How are you?
N: Good.
Me: I'm glad. No more scary dreams?
N: No.
Me: Good.
N: But my dream was so scary! In it, the ONLY THING I could do to SAVE a person from DYING was to get a globe and turn it into a wolf and make it CHASE someone!
Me: Wow! That's complicated, and scary!
N: And it had to chase YOU!
Me: Wow.

*pause while I try to figure out what on earth to say to this*

Me: You know, if the only way you could save someone from dying was to make a wolf chase me, I would want you to do that and it would be okay. And it's still a really scary thing to think about.
N: Yeah.
Me: Yeah.

*another pause*

N: And then it chased ME!!!
Me: Oh no!
N: Yes. And then I put my nose up to its nose and looked at it and then we made friends and it was okay.


To be honest, I think that last part was her rewriting the ending after waking up, and maybe also remembering this picture:



And that's okay with me. Rewriting endings to bad stories in your head can be a powerful tool.

But really? Weighing certain death for someone else against having to inflict frightening possible death on your mommy? That's a complex philosophical problem and I'm honestly not certain I'm equipped to tackle it at 7 in the morning.

It remains true: raising this kid is going to be very interesting.

Looking over school photo packages in preparation for picture day tomorrow, I discovered the following items I could get my kid's mug on:

• Fake magazine covers (fashion, sports, science, art)
  
• Strange thematic cardboard items
  
• temporary tattoos (I bet those are a really unpleasant hit in middle school)
  
• Fake IDs
  
• ...as well as magnets, wall decals, doorhangers (?!), and more! (though not, in fact, a mug)
  
  Seriously, temporary tattoos? Who does that?

Natalie declared it 'pajama day'; this didn't stop us from going to the bank, the post office, or a coffee shop, or from biking through the park and to the grocery store and back.