Garbage Collection Day

Sometimes you just have to set your priorities.









And sometimes watching Curious George just can't compete with watching the garbage truck make its rounds.

Ellie moments not to be caught on film

I suppose "caught on film" is a bit antiquated as any device I have for capturing Ellie's image is digital. Unfortunately, she is not too fond of said devices. She has not taken to the idea of posing or even smiling for a picture. Any smiles I get on record have to be candid, with my timing rather strategic. Most of the videos I take of her are either of the back of her while she walks and jabbers (walkie-talkie! ha!) or sneaking up behind her while she sits and plays. Once she notices the camera, she either stops what she's doing and/or grabs for the camera. Any video taken from the front ends up being a close-up of one nostril and then half her mouth as she tries to eat the camera, or her little hand trying to push it away.

So I am left with even older technology than film to try to preserve some of my favorite Ellie moments of late: the antique word. Some of these moments I did try to catch and failed horribly, and some I just really wished I had something with me at the time to preserve the memory.

• Mountain Goat Ellie. Like most toddlers, Ellie wants to climb everything she can. Often mid-diaper-change she decides to stand up on her changing table and try to climb onto the attached shelf, sans fresh diaper. When she accompanied me the first week I filled in at the nursery at church, her first move was to climb on the little chairs, then the little table and do a dance during snack time. She insists on riding the rocking horse in the family room standing up, and often drags it around the room to use as a step to reach forbidden DVD player buttons. Her favorite spot to play is on the fireplace (a losing battle we've decided), which is sort of a one-foot stage for her. She seems to navigate it well enough, so we didn't worry too much about it. Until one day Brady and I turned to see her standing upright on top of the wood stove, eying the brick mantle. I'm sure she could have scaled the rest of the fireplace without much trouble if we hadn't snatched her down. Honestly, my first thoughts were "oh, no!" and simultaneously, "I kind of wish I had the camera handy . . ."
  
• Ellie's Dance Party. We set up our stereo in Ellie's room, way back when we were still desperate to get her to sleep and thought playing lullabies might help. Sometimes we let her play with the remote during a diaper change, just to keep her occupied. She is happy to turn it on and off, play with the volume, and change discs while we get a hassle-free diaper change. One day when I went to get her after a nap, she sounded particularly distressed. Outside her door, I heard some strange thumping. When I entered, I heard loud, heavy bass backing up some pretty intense club-style music. Ellie just looked at me and whimpered and I burst out laughing once I realized what happened. Somehow she hit the right combination of buttons to set the timer to turn on the radio and wake her up from her nap (something I have never learned to do). I'm not sure about her selection of radio station, though. I thought I had a few more years before I had to get after her about her music.
  
• Reading with Ellie. The way to Ellie's heart is books (well, books, graham crackers, and Elmo). They are her best toys and some of our best memories are reading with Ellie. Lately she has been making us read The Remarkable Farkle McBride several times a day. A while ago it was The Little Mouse, the Red, Ripe Strawberry, and the Big, Hungry Bear. One day after reading it about three times in a row, I finally told Ellie, "You read it," when she requested a repeat. To my surprise, she opened the book and yelled, "boom-Boom-BOOM!" correctly narrating the bear tromping through the forest, and then, "yum!" at the end when you eat up the strawberry. She loved to run around quoting that one (even at church) and it has been fun seeing what stands out in her favorites when she takes a turn "reading" them. But probably the best was when she sat and tried to feed cheerios to each of the ducks in an open board book, telling them "wack, wack, wack."
  
• Yogi Ellie. After having my back go out a couple times in the last few months, I decided to get more serious about doing some stretching every day. Since Ellie nap-time hours are already claimed for other things, I often end up having to do a bit of yoga while Curious George or Baby Einstein is on. Ellie has her own opinions about my new routine. It doesn't bother her a bit if I doze off on the couch while her shows are on, but if I try to do anything like read, work, or now stretch, she isn't thrilled. She marches onto the mat right in front of me and dances so I can't stretch forward or tries to pull me up from the ground. My favorite was one morning when I managed a brief routine, holding a downward facing dog pose and Ellie crawled between my feet, scooted up toward my head and shouted, "ah-BOO!" Perhaps a more interactive routine would suite.
  
• Slap me five. Dinner with Ellie often has its rewarding moments. Sometimes it just makes my day to see her scarf down her peas, rather than squish each one with her thumb until the insides pop out of their skin. Most of the time I am trying to get myself fed with my left hand while she tugs on my right arm when she wants something new. She has the vocabulary to ask for most of the food items or utensils she wants, but this system started several months ago and sadly seems to have stuck. It's not uncommon for me to be out and discover Ellie food hand prints on the right elbow of my sweater. One evening she kept tugging on my arm. I offered everything I could think of that she might want, but she kept tugging. Frustrated, I let out, "Ellie, what else do you want? Just say it." She pulled my arm up again and started patting my palm with her other hand and said, " 'igh five!" I guess I hadn't offered her everything.
• Singing. Ellie will occasionally grace us with a quick three-note song upon request, then set down whatever she's holding to applaud herself. One day I was singing a silly song to keep her distracted during a diaper change. Then I asked her to sing to me. She responded with a confident, yelling, "ahh-doy-a-doy-a-doy-a," which makes me wonder what I sound like to her. She went around the house singing like that all day. Another time as I sang her a quick lullaby before nap time, she took her pacifier out and put it in my mouth. Apparently she knows better than I do when it's time for mommy to be done.

On Cub Scout Writing

My calling for the last six months has been to work with the Bear Cub Scouts in our ward (9-year-old boys). Yesterday I was in a bit of a panic because I realized I didn't have anything really planned for our 5:00 den meeting (I still feel like I'm learning how to do this). I flipped through the book and saw that one of their achievements was about writing, with one of the specific requirements being to write a story. Perfect. I just had to take pencils and paper and my years of teaching and editing savvy. All set.

Four out of the five boys in the group showed up, and we gathered around a table. We started out talking about writing in general, and I asked them what kind of writing they did. Their response was "answers for history," "just for math" (?) and "cursive." I told them we were going to write stories. A couple looked pretty dubious, while one piped up, "Oh, I already know what I'm going to write about." I assured the more hesitant scouts that I would help them and that first we would just talk about how to write a story to get them warmed up. To my surprise, each of the four took notes on our conversation--without me telling them to, which beats a lot of my college students. They really got into it. My first (and really only) question was, "What makes a good story?" I expected a list of answers to include anything from superheroes to huge explosions. Instead, here is a bit of our conversation:

Scout1: Time and place! Uh . . . setting!

Me: (a bit surprised) That's right. You need to decide where you want your story to happen and when, like in the future or maybe a hundred years ago.

Scout 2: Well, mine's just going to be about aliens, where this guy has to fight them and stuff, but some of them end up being good, but on level three he gets turned into a zombie . . . [apparently his story is based on a video game he and scout 1 play a lot], so I don't think mine really has a setting.

Me: Okay, I think it does--even if it's not on our planet, but we can talk more about it when you start your story if you get stuck. What else does a story need?

Scout 3: Like a problem?

Scout 1: Yeah! Action!!

Me: Yes. You mean plot.

Scout 4: (disappointed) Ohhh . . . I'm not going to do plot in my story.

Me: Well, the plot is what happens in your story. Is something going to happen?

Scout 4: Oh, I guess. Yeah, I'll do plot.

Me: So if something is going to happen in our stories, who will it happen to?

Scout 3: Characters.

Me: That's right. You will have characters, or the people in your story.

Scout 4: (worried) But what if our story doesn't have any characters?

Me: Sorry. They don't have to be people. They could be animals too. Maybe animals who talk.

Scout 4 looks relieved, Scout 2 is getting ready to protest.

Me: They can be aliens too.

Everyone is satisfied.

Scout 1: And you have to have first person and third person.

Me: (again, surprised by the literary vocabulary of the group) You mean a narrator.

Scout 4: Ughh.

Scout 3: I don't think my story will really have one of those.

Scout 2: Yeah, do we have to have a narrator? I hate narrators.

Me: (a bit stymied, trying to think under what circumstances and what literary theory that might just work) Yes, you do. I mean, someone is going to tell the story, whether it's one of the characters saying, "I did this" or someone outside the story saying, "He did this." Just decide which way you want to tell the story and you will have a narrator. . . . What else? What if your characters talk to each other? What's that?

Blank stares.

Scout 2: Do they have to talk to each other?

Me: Well, no. But sometimes dialogue can make a story more interesting. Instead of just saying characters got into an argument or told a bunch of funny jokes, you could actually write out what they said.

I then show them how to make quotation marks around words and sentences in case they wanted to use any dialogue.

Me: Is there anything else you can think of that we might want for a good story?

Scout 1: . . . nouns . . . ?

Me: Those are pretty important too. I was thinking about details. If you just said, "Christopher Columbus got in a boat and crossed the ocean," that's not a very interesting story. What makes it interesting is the details.

Scout 4: Yeah. You have to say, "He got in a big, big boat and crossed the Pacific Ocean," and stuff like that.

Me: Yeah . . . that helps. [mental note: plan an activity involving geography or at least the distinction between Atlantic and Pacific Oceans . . .] What if you want to describe something as cold? You could just say, "it was cold outside," but that could mean anything from kind of chilly to 40 degrees below zero. What if you said, "It was so cold his spit froze before it hit the ground"?

They all laughed, and then started a new conversation about whether or not such an act were really feasible. Which brings me to my last, but probably most important element of story-writing that we never got around to discussing: know your audience. At any rate, I think I am starting to learn their language.

In the end, the first two scouts wrote stories about their video game, with themselves as protagonists. Scout 4 wrote a story about a misunderstood dragon who was nice but everyone was afraid of him because he was so big and breathed fire. Scout 3 was a bit miffed that the paper I brought wasn't lined, so spent some of the time making lines on his paper, and then the rest writing a story really about himself and his brother, thinly veiled as a story about two guinea pigs with the same names. Most of my editorial function was serving as human dictionary and spell checker when asked, and video game consultant (they explained the whole thing to me in great detail so I could help them decide which ship one of them should be flying to start his story). At one point, though, Scout 1 did ask if it would be better to just say "they got on the ship," or if he should have one of the characters say, "let's go get on the ship." Clearly, my professorial days are not behind me.

Ellie Unleashed

Or "Why I Don't Post on the Blog More Often."



Ellie has been getting a little better at playing independently lately.



So when she seemed content to go upstairs to play on her own, I let her. All the doors were closed except the one to her room. Seemed safe enough.



I thought I would take the chance to check email, maybe check a blog or two, and if I was really lucky, post comments on friends' blogs, something I never seem to do. (Even though I read each and every one of your blog posts. Really.) About two minutes in, I heard a loud crash. No crying, but still suspicious.



Then it occurred to me what Ellie's definition of "play" is. It means to pull everything she can reach off shelves and tables and spread them nicely across the floor. Including lamps and lampshades it seems.



Every morning she pulls all the board books off the shelf in the family room, dumps out the wooden block on top of them, and then does a little "dance, dance, dance" on top of them all. Zero to hurricane aftermath in a minute flat.



So while she is more of an independent player, she's not much of an unsupervised player yet. I have been wanting to do more writing and have several backlogged blog posts (ha! say that three times fast), but until Ellie's definition of "play" involves her folding the laundry and picking up the toys, it would seem my Ellie-free time is limited.

P.S. The pictures are mostly blurry because this is how Ellie feels about the camera flash:


So either every picture turns out with that expression (really) or I have to try for flashless, kind of fuzzy pictures. I'll work on my lighting technique. The hair, on the other hand, I have no control over. But that's another post . . .