All About Eleanor

Who needs pre-school?

She couldn't come to dinner because she was too busy reading.

• Favorite book: pretty much any book, but she has really been enjoying our A. A. Milne collection. Today, she wouldn't let me read her a story. She followed me around the house with books, but she wanted to read them to me. Some stories, she practically knows word for word. Others, she only knows the title of the book, so she repeats it each time she turns a page. Others, she makes up the story based on the pictures. It's really fun to listen to, especially with her pronunciation. Today, she kept reading me Spot Helps Out, and it was one of the books where she only knew the title. So, she repeated over and over, "Pot helps out." (She doesn't usually pronounce her S-es on the first of a word when followed by a consonant.)



• My nursery super-star, who has loved nursery from day one, is starting to regress a bit. She's had a few melt-downs over getting bumped or scratched, and the nursery leaders have had to bring her to us. She has even asked me before going to nursery, "And if I cry, they will bring me to you?" I don't know if it's the new ward or the new sister-- probably the combination, but she's just not quite as at home in nursery.


• She loves her little sister and loves helping. She's quick to grab me a new diaper for Phaedra any time I put her on the changing table. If I already got one, she puts it back for me, insisting I use the one she got for me.


• She can't decide if she wants to be a baby or a big girl. She wants to use all the things we have for Phaedra as if they were for her. She wants her blankets, her carseat, etc.


• Sometimes she's a baby, and sometimes she's a mommy. She either wants to be Phaedra (but not by name- just a baby, doing the same things as Phaedra) or she wants to be just like me, her baby dolls playing the roll of Phaedra.


• She acts things out lately. She has jumped into roll-playing with no prompt whatsoever. The other day, she told me I was bear and she was sheep, and acted out a scene from Word World, telling me what to do all along the way. She'll even act out encounters she has had with real people, pretending to be them.


• She has gotten so tall over the summer. She used to be so much shorter than her friends her age, but now she is catching up to most of them.


• She has her dad's decision making skills. When you give her a choice between several things, such as colors or varieties, she chooses immediately and rarely changes her mind, even when coaxed. The girl knows what she wants.


• She sounds so funny when she tries out some of her new words and phrases that she picks up (mostly from us), such as "actually" and "the important thing is. . ." But she pronounces it "the 'portant thing is. . ."


• She pays special attention to stop lights. One day, she was driving with Grant and he taught her this little ditty: Green means go, red means stop, yellow means wait, even if you're late! So now she points out the colors of the lights to me and recites what her daddy taught her. It sounds like, "Wait, even if you're wait!" (complete with shaking finger).


• She loves our front-loading washer and dryer. I can ask her to put clothes in the washer or move clothes from the washer to the dryer, and she goes right to it. Sometimes, she shoos me out of the room, saying, "Go out. I am busy workin'." She gets very perturbed if I don't let her push the start button.


• Grant has been putting her to bed a lot lately while I deal with the baby. She has switched from wanting to be sung to before bed to reading stories, which makes sense, considering Grant's singing. Sometimes, after stories, she still asks him for a song or two. He is great at one part of singing I am not, and that's made up songs. Eleanor will ask him for a Khhh song (basically a sound effect she makes up), and he makes it up on the spot and sings to her. Example: "Khhh went my feet in the gravel. . ." He's amazing. She eats it up.


• She loves to tell people the story about when the police officer came to our new house to stop the alarm. She was very afraid of that alarm, and it took a long time to convince her it wouldn't go off again. If you didn't hear the story, the security system armed itself randomly one day, and Brinks wouldn't shut it off unless we had a police officer come and verify that we own the house now.