Dear Eleri,
You're a funny little girl. It's not just me, this is what people tell us. She's a funny girl, they say, and then they tell us stories. Like this: at school, all the kids have cubbies with their photos on the outside, and you like to go up to each one, lean against it as if you were sitting in a chair, say their name, and laugh, or cackle, really. You laugh a lot, and I find that your dad and I are constantly smiling at the little things you do and say. You LOVE to jump, and you gallop around the house. You also climb on everything you can and say "kiming," and you show us the way things go around and around (fans, wheels), with an arm gesture so dramatic it almost knocks you over. In fact, this enthusiasm means I tend to flinch when you come at me, never quite sure how powerfully you will fling yourself my way. You do this when I am trying to read Clio her bedtime stories on the couch, leaping across us or doing this patented sideways move whereby you just sort of appear on my lap, generally between Clio and the book's pictures. You love to point out trucks or buses out the window, and have a special fondness for the bells of the ice cream truck, which you pronounce in a way so cute, I must capture it on video. (That and water bottle. You will point them out around the house and say: Dio's batto batto, Daddy's batto batto, Ellli's batto batto.) You are very interested in this notion of possession, and are constantly establishing that things are yours. You open your half of the closet, point at the dresses, and say "Mines," always in the plural. I suppose this makes sense for a child who received candles in the final quarter of her sister's cake for her own birthday.
You are supremely generous and easy going. Both Clio and your friend Dakota frequently take things away from you; what they have yet to learn is that you would simply hand it over if they just asked. At school, your teacher says you sometimes take something from another child for the sheer pleasure of returning it. You enjoy other kinds of helping, like cleaning up spills and putting toys away. The other night, I think you kept spilling more water on the floor in order to wipe it up. Your generosity extends to children who are unhappy or have been hurt. When Clio cries (not an infrequent occurrence), you will go to her, lay your head on her shoulder, give her a hug or a kiss. You also stroke her hair when we say "gentle"; unfortunately, it is not so much that you have learned the concept of acting gently, it's more that you understand this as a remedy to a hurt you may have just inflicted.
It's true: you're pretty physical. I think of you as being "more like a boy" for whatever that's worth: throwing, running, jumping, building, climbing, and yes, sometimes hitting. I do think this comes from your frustration at not being understood. So many of your words sound alike, it can be a detective process to figure out what you're trying to tell us, and I think sometimes you give up. You resort. Mostly, I think this is okay- you don't hurt anybody- but I do hope we can help with the language troubles. You understand so much, and you clearly have a ton you want to say; it's hard to imagine the frustration of waiting for the rest of us to catch up, to piece it together. Often, after severeal tries, I'll ask you to show me, or to point, and this generally solves things. I try to remember to tell you the correct pronunciation, to get you to repeat it back to me, but you can be stubborn and generally don't want to do what you don't want to do. You've been sick lately (we've all been sick lately) with walking pneumonia, and the medicine you need to take happens to taste gross and have a gritty texture. The first day, unaware, you took it. The second day, you traded for your milk (you LOVE your milk). The third day, you refused altogether, you even refused ice cream (your favorite thing on earth, apart from jumping and your baby stroller) because you saw me put the medicine in. You just plugged your mouth with your thumb and turned away definitively. So I have learned to mix the medicine in with my back to you, and you have had ice cream every night for a week.
You make this funny noise and gesture where you pretend to gobble something up. You'll mimic grabbing something from the top of your head, from behind my ear, and then motion to toss it in your mouth. It's super silly, and since we laughed the first time you do it a lot. You love Old McDonald, and at night, after I sing Hush Little Baby, you say "E I E I O" as a signal to sing it. You always choose cat first, lately expanding it to kitty cat. You can sing most of the alphabet song and do some counting, though you usually start with 9 and then sort of jump around from there. In the morning, you do not want to change out of your onesie and I've been layering little sleeveless dresses over the top. When you sleep in pajamas, you often wear them to school. You have new shoes (you can put your shoes on yourself), a pair of gold and copper mary janes with a fur trimmed edge (from the $15 table at the big sale), that you love. You're decisive, see? When we went shopping to pick out birthday presents, you picked up a baby, found her a stroller, and that was that.
Since we have previous knowledge this time, and a better handle on the phases, I'm always curious to see what is your personality and what is a developmental stage. As you head into the twos, will you lost that decisive edge as so many toddlers do, grow confused as you understand the concept of options, or is that simply who you are? As your language develops, will you use words instead of actions, or will you always rely on the physical, the satisfaction of comedy in your pratfalls? I do believe your stubbornness will prevail, but tempered by your generosity; of course, it will be such fun to see how it develops.
Eleri, baby girl, little noodle, you bring such joy to all of our lives, always such a surprise, such a determined way of doing things, like when you joined us in such a rush two years ago, Daddy had to catch you in the bathtub, and the midwife had to instruct us, by speakerphone, how to get you breathing and coax you from blue to pink, while we marveled that you were a girl. A girl! So like a boy, or, I suppose really, so like her very own person.
Love,
Mommy
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