The Number Field

With her increasing mental and physical faculties, Elena likes to announce all the things she can do, or at least thinks she can do. Whenever possible, she then proceeds to do them. Whether it's putting on her own shoes, setting the table, or something else, we love to see her try.

Most of the time we like it when she does chores. She's just the right height to put clothes into the dryer and pull them out, but also likes to reach up high and put them into the washer too. Jenny's the one who does the laundry, but I hear about it when we read Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and she says "daddy, I wash clothes!" after we read the first verse. She also likes the second verse, where she gets to say "daddy, I clean room!" She does--both while she sings a clean up song to herself when we put away her toys before bedtime, and when she helps make our bed, which we recently took off bed risers so it's shorter.

Among other chores, Elena likes to wash dishes, but there her help is less welcome, because she just wants to play in the water. She doesn't usually like wet clothes, but is willing to overlook that small inconvenience when we let her pull a chair up to the sink. She likes it so much that she cries when her time is up.

In other aspects her statements are more aspirational than actionable. There are lots of pictures of bicycles in her books, and she likes to say "I ride bike?" I think she wants to learn to ride as soon as it warms up. She sees me ride sometimes, so she knows I'll be able to teach her. On a similar note, she found a photo album with some pictures of me in younger years. I don't know how she puts the pieces together, but now she can melt my heart with "Daddy row boat--I row boat?"

We like to color together. She asks me to draw something--a car, or a choo-choo train, and then says "Daddy draw car? I draw car!" She scribbles madly for a few seconds, then proudly points at her work and declares "a car!" A few minutes later, she usually remembers that she drew a car, but can't always figure out which scribble was the one.

Last night, after some negotiation about the number of books, I had started to read Elena our agreed-upon bedtime stories. She glanced over to the toy bin that sits next to the rocking chair . The things in there aren't in her regular playtime rotation, but something caught her eye. She got off my lap and pulled out a stuffed buffalo, which became our reading companion. Elena made sure that he had a good view of every page; after all, everyone needs to know their colors.

Today buffalo became a full-fledged member of her family. He came downstairs, he had to have a place of honor near the table during mealtime, he put in some time as Elena's neighing steed. At bedtime, after picking out books, she ran out of the room with cries of "baa, baa." I thought it was just a delay tactic until she got to the bottom of the stairs and headed purposefully to the table, where she pulled buffalo off the shelf he had been sitting on since dinner. After all, he's her new reading companion.

We are trying to come to terms with the consequences of Elena's active imagination and ever-deepening memory. If only her communication skills were at the same level, maybe it would be slightly easier.

We have accumulated a grab bag of parenting tricks and tactics that seem to work much of the time when our desires are not entirely in line with Elena's plans. They aren't firmly grounded in psychology or philosophy, and she might outgrow them at any minute. Sometimes I feel like we're manipulating her, but then she cries for five minutes and stops instantly as soon as we show signs of giving in, so it's a two way street and I don't feel too bad.

Elena has grown selectively picky about food, but we have ways of making her eat. Most of the time she'll buy in if we all take a bite at the same time, but she does occasionally fake us out. A second technique is starting to work as she begins to grasp conditional logic. When there's one dish that she wants, we tell her that if she takes a bite of the main dish, then she can have some of what she wants. The other night, she ate most of her chicken and rice casserole in exchange for peaches. By the end, she seemed to like the casserole on its own.

Bathtime gives me another chance to work with her growing cognitive skills; in this case her sense of self and other and her nurturing tendencies. She likes playing with toys in the water, but doesn't always want to get soapy. However, she responded affirmatively to my suggestion that we wash one of her toys. As we were washing the Little Pony and talking about how nice it was to be clean, she let me wash her without complaint.

Going to stores is always a risky proposition, starting with the coin-operated kiddie rides at the entrance. I find that she's happy to spend about a minute on them and then come into the store, which hopefully sets us up for a good experience. Jenny has a different opinion, especially when it's cold out.

Once in the store, we're not too worried about Elena breaking things, so we let her look at the merchandise. She frequently puts things back in their proper place on her own, and almost always does so when we make the request. Consistency is key here, because sometimes we can convince her to "find a place to put that" when she know she doesn't want to give it up. While browsing clearance Christmas items at Kmart, she picked up a doll-blanket combo and carried it around. When it was time to go, we went back to the shelf where she found it and asked her to put it down and tell it goodbye. She complied of her own accord, and we walked all the way to the end of the aisle before she started to cry.

Consistency is also important at bedtime. When I say that it's time to go to bed, she wags her finger and says "no, no, no." But she likes getting into her pajamas and reading books, and once we've started those activities, she's locked in. We have to be careful to keep things moving along, because any small change could get incorporated as a necessary part of the routine.

When Elena had a cold in the past few weeks, we put the Mr. Penguin the humidifier in her room, and now she's in love with it--giving it hugs and kisses before bed. We were also giving her Tylenol before bed (cough syrup is no longer approved for children's use). Even though she's better and we're out of medicine, she's incorporated it into the bedtime routine.

After our family prayer we go into the bathroom and fill the medicine cup with a little bit of water, which she drinks. We call it water and don't try to hide the fact that it comes from the faucet, but she still thinks it's an important part of the routine. We're pretty sure this is not something that we want her to expect, but don't have any ideas for transitioning her away from it. There's no telling how long it will last; the more enjoyable night-night tickle time lasted for months, but seems to have receded now.

On Saturday Elena and I went on a daddy-daughter outing to the park. There was still snow on the ground and ice at the bottom of the slides, which I was able to clear off so that Elena could go down them. It was good that she wasn't wearing her good pants, because they were pretty wet and dirty when we got back. She wanted to try all the slides, show some one year old twins how to use the slides, go spend time on the swings, and then get right back to the slides.

Her love affair with playgrounds in general and slides in particular goes back almost a year, as chronicled in the second of our year in review videos:

If the video doesn't show up in your browser, click here .

We were invited by new friends over to dinner this evening. They have teenagers. I took a short break from our after dinner discussion to check on Elena, and was not surprised to find her in the living room wrestling with the teenagers. She also enjoyed their two mini schnauzers, especially when they were comfortable enough to sit in her lap .

Last weekend we visited my parents for dinner, and the highlight of Elena's trip was energetic playtime with her grandpa. She would run up at full speed and almost throw herself at him. He lifted her high above his head, or pulled her in sideways, or just tickled her. After a while they both started to cough from the exertion (Elena was still getting over a cold; I don't know whether the same was true for my father) and I had to intervene--if I hadn't encouraged them to take a break, they would have kept going.

A week before that, we had the pleasure of a visit from Elena's cousins Kaitlyn and Micah, along with their father. Kaitlyn is almost seven years old, but she wasn't necessarily used to Elena's style of play, and lodged several complaints about being pushed. Kaitlyn is very polite; she always prefaces her requests with "excuse me" and then explains the perceived grievance. After that, we had to decide whether to intervene and how to mediate. Sometimes she had a good point and Elena spent an age-appropriate amount of time--about two minutes--in a secure time out location. Other times I had seen what happened and decided that no disciplinary action was required. In those cases, Kaitlyn accepted my explanation.

We had lots of fun with the cousins, as it was the first time that we've spent significant time with them since we moved here. The weather was warm enough for a trip to the park, where we discovered that not all the Canada geese had migrated further south, and that ducks look pretty funny when they try to walk on ice. As usual, Elena enjoyed the slides and swings, while Kaitlyn and Micah seemed to focus more on the climbing areas and pretend play sections.

Another highlight was our big pizza dinner. The kids didn't eat very much, but they did have a great time to making it. I don't know why they didn't eat very much--it was pizza, which kids are supposed to love, and good pizza at that! In any case, our visit with the cousins was all too short. Elena cried when they left and we wouldn't let her go with them. We hope to see them again soon, but in the meantime at least we get to have their dad visit us on a regular basis.

When I was a child, I had a 'family' of stuffed animals. When I wasn't playing with them, I arranged them neatly on my bed. I never thought of myself as being father or brother to my stuffed animal family; I was just in charge of them. Since opening the last of her Christmas presents, Elena has enough baby dolls and stuffed animals for a sizeable family of her own. She has a different relationship with them than I did with mine--she clearly thinks of herself as their mother.

New Baby and Pink Bear are the most recent additions to the family. New Baby was a gift from Elena's Washington grandparents and came with a collection of accessories--bed, stroller, high chair/swing, diaper bag, and more. Because the box she came in was too big for our car, Elena didn't open the present until we returned home after Christmas. She was excited to have one more present to open, and even more excited to see what was inside. She loves the whole package, including the accessories, because she knows just how to use them to take care of New Baby.

Pink Bear came to life in the Build-a-Bear Workshop . It wasn't technically a Christmas present; instead, Jenny had won a gift card from a blog and also found a coupon that expired at the end of the year, so we needed to go build the bear to get the best deal. Elena has enjoyed browsing the store when we've been at the mall before, but it was hard for her to pick only one animal to take home. She doesn't distinguish fine gradations of preference--when we held two options in front of her, she just wanted to hug both of them. We had to rely on our intuition about what would make her happy in the long run. Between the gift card and coupon we had enough to buy the bear a vest and sunglasses, and although I'm not usually a fan of accessories, I think that these were good choices.

We can tell that Elena thinks of herself as the mommy because of the way she takes care of her babies. Before Elena goes down for a nap, she puts her dolls to bed. New Baby sleeps in her own bed, the other baby often sleeps on the ottoman, and the other toys sleep in various places. After Elena wakes up, she gets her babies up for playtime. The other day Jenny noticed that the two babies were playing in the tunnel, which must have been where Elena put them for playtime. At other times, she feeds New Baby from the bottle or gives her a pacifier.

Last night, after Elena and I showed Luke and Jessica how we do fire the cannonball , I had to do the same stunt with each and every one of her little family members. This evening we cleaned up all her toys before bed, then she laid the dolls down for 'night-night.' After that she was ready to head up to bed. Getting her into bed has been harder than usual for the past few weeks, so anything that smooths the process and gets her in the right mindset is a good idea. It didn't work perfectly, because we still had some bedtime strife, but we're hopeful that we can get back on track, with or without the help of Elena's other 'family.'

Now that we're looking at the holidays in the rear-view mirror, it's time to write about the theme and contents of this year's family Christmas packages * . This year's theme was somewhat nonlinear, as we had a couple different themes and unifying elements.

As I recall, our original plan was to make the packages Elena-centric; every item would be a toy or some other thing that she liked to play with. That became an organizing principle, but it wasn't enough by itself. As in past years, we wanted the items to tell the story of what happened to us during the year, so that came into play as well.

I eventually struck on a crazy idea for an item that could bring everything else together: a handcrafted wooden puzzle. Not only has Elena been a big fan of puzzles for the past several months, but the pieces would showcase some of the most meaningful events of the year, and each piece would tie in to one or two of the other gifts in the package.

To make the puzzle, I needed better tools than I own--I was grateful to borrow my father's scroll saw. Without it, I would have been lost in frustration. Even with it, the work was almost overwhelming, but I was encouraged by the progress and the quality of work. Jenny doubted the idea at first, but when she saw that I had the will to make it happen, she got involved and did an equal share. In the end, we were proud of the results.

Clockwise from top left, the puzzle pieces are:

• Birthday cake from Elena's first birthday party. We wanted to give cake pops with each of the packages, but somehow they only went out with the ones that we mailed, not with those that we hand-delivered. Those who didn't receive cake pops have two consolations: we've probably already shared cake pops with them, and they can ask us to make a fresh batch for the next time we see them.
• Our family has a good time whenever we're all together. Though this photo isn't supposed to recall any specific event, it was taken on the Fourth of July. The present that went along with this piece was a framed family photo.
• The Capitol building is close to our new home on the east coast. In perhaps the weakest connection between puzzle piece and gift item, we included dolphin trinkets and fish finger puppets , recalling our trip to the National Aquarium .
• Elena in jewelry was accompanied by candy necklaces. She certainly has a strong sense of style, recently branching out into bracelets. She got glow stick bracelets in her Christmas stocking. The other day Jenny started one going and took her in the dark bathroom so Elena could get the full effect. When I arrived home in the evening, the first thing she wanted to do was put it on and take me in the bathroom so I could see how cool it was.
• Jewel with stuffed animals didn't have a present to go along with it, but it was such a fun picture I wanted to include it. Maybe we should have included a stuffed animal. In any case, it reminds us of the time we spent living with my parents.
• The University of Texas tower commemorates the place where we lived most of the year, as well as the completion of my dissertation. For the first part, we sent cowgirl rubber duckies . For the second, I formatted my dissertation for a paperback printing on Lulu so everyone could have a copy. I gave it a burnt orange cover so it would stand out on bookshelves.

Every year there comes a time when it looks like the Christmas packages are going to take over, and we decide to narrow our scope for the following year, but so far that hasn't happened. I don't think next year will see a reduction in our efforts--we already have a good theme and some concrete projects. Even better, we should be able to work on the projects a little at a time over the course of the year, and not force it all into a hectic November and December. In the meantime, if you're interested in making a custom puzzle yourself or would like to special order one from me, let me know.

* Each year we prepare a themed Christmas package to send to our immediate family members. For descriptions of the past two years' gifts, see here .