Now we are frozen

I assume she's been talking about Frozen with other children since she started nursery. Because in the past fortnight she's declared her name is Anna and I am Elsa.

It was fun at first. We had pretend snowball fights and made pretend snowmen and bunnies and mice and elephants, and even a pretend ice castle in the living room. She'd declare Now you're Queen Elsa and Now you're little Princess Elsa.

I found her singing Let it go very loudly in public toilets a bit disquieting.

Then on day two she decided her mum was Other Elsa.

On day three I was demoted full time to Princess Elsa and her mum was Queen Elsa. It felt like my old job all over again. (I'm sorry, you're not Scandinavian enough to do your job)

Now she's still demanding we call her Anna. Whenever we call her by her real name, she says Say Anna. Every. Single. Time.
She even introduces herself to people as Anna. I suspect she likes it better than her actual name since small children have an easier time pronouncing it.

She's seen the movie, in full, once, plus that time on the plane when she saw half of it. So, good for her with the good memory.

She told us this will last for several weeks. It can't be over fast enough for my tastes. I'm a bit tired of the whole princess thing, but I am more sick of being introduced has her sister.

The sparkle in your eyes keeps me alive

It's kind of weird how songs take on a completely different meaning once you have children. You'll just never hear them the same again, and after a while you'll start to question if you ever actually knew what the song was all about. Is it a love song, or just swooning over an infant? Is it about dancing, sex or just playing in a bouncy castle? At this point I can't hear the lyric baby in a song without picturing it being sung to a toddler.

I pick up my daughter at nursery pretty much the same way each time. It's just after lunch. I come in the room and see her playing. Eventually she looks up at me and her eyes just shine and she smiles. And to this day the lyrics the sparkle in your eyes keeps me alive have taken on a completely different meaning. It’s shocking how much peace and solace your child can give you. Turns out that kiss-it-all-better works both ways.

Anyway, not to belabour the point, here's a smattering of lyrics and I can no longer hear without thinking about my child:

You think you're tired now, but wait until three

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed Is here in my arms

Destroy everything you touch today, destroy me this way

Oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got blue eyes, oh you've got grey eyes. And I've never met anyone quite like you before.

Grabbing hands grab all they can all for themselves after all

And that's just off the top of my head. I could probably list dozens of these here.

3 is a magic number

Within moments of turning 3, her personality took a shift to the difficult. It's one of the reasons I've not posted here for ages. That and work sucking up every waking minute not spent with my daughter.

Anyway, to the topic at hand – she's not become malicious or evil or anything, it's just a number of things are now harder. Obstinate. That sums up much of it. She has enough mastery of language to explain what she wants but not enough to be able to be reasoned with.

The troublesome threes have begun.

Not everything is harder. I've gotten her to go to sleep something like 4 times in the past 3 months, which is a record for me.
Once she even fell asleep while I was reading to her. And this was a short picture book, not a 100+ page novel like last time.

That and today, a few minutes ago, which is how I have time to write this. She's been zombie-like all morning with her eyes little more than slits. I asked and she told me she wasn't a bit tired. Well, you're clearly not feeling quite right, so why not take a toy and have a wee lie down on the sofa? She took her slinkies and was asleep in 2 minutes.)

Other inconveniences are her wilful regressions. She can go to the loo by herself. But, when we're around she doesn't want to. Same with dinner. She can focus and eat a whole meal by herself, but she won't with us. It's like she's learned a skill, mastered it, and found it to be easier to not do it if someone else will do it for you. The only way I can think of solving this is to buy a new house with a different toilet and dining room.

And then she started nursery.

We're doing 3 days a week, 8am-1pm. Getting her up and out for 8am was a scary shift. For all of us. I've managed to get myself to bed by 3am most days since we started this, so that's a plus. But her sleep still hasn't got on track. She's mostly dropped her nap, and often misses her new earlier bed time, which means sleep deprivation might be cause of some of her 3-related personality shifts (she can join the club of overtired mood swings – I founded this local chapter).

Nursery has done a lot of good for her. She's hanging out with other children her age on a regular basis, and loves it. When she leaves nursery at the end of the day, it sometimes turns into hugs-for-everyone time.
It's like she's just discovered that there's this thing called "other people" and you can do things with them. On friday, on the way home from the park she just walked up to a couple at a bus stop, introduced herself and told them she was three. Every time we've been to a park for the past month she picked at least one smaller child, befriended them, and took them all over the playground Come, come, come, let's play!.

She also eats far better at nursery. It's the combination of someone besides us feeding her, her getting stuff we never cook at home, and them having a dedicated member of staff whose job it is to make a variety of foods for a shedload of picky babies and toddlers.

On the other hand, the grammar of some of the staff at nursery is horrendous. While I can find it hard to complain about having east-end accents in a Hackney day care, I'd at least expect better conjugation of "to be". The only think that consoles me is that the girl used "yourself" correctly in conversation the other day, so all must not be lost.

Well, that backfired

The girl took a small cardboard puzzle she had done and threw all the pieces all over the floor. I demanded she pick it up and put the mess away into its box. She refused, saying the box was a bed for another toy. I told her, fine. If I have to pick it up, I'm just throwing it away.

Ok.

Okay then. Do you want to throw it out or should I

You do it, please.

I'm throwing it out now.

I pick it all up and throw it in the recycling bin while she watches.

Two minutes later she find a piece which fell under a rug Oh!

Throw it out then.

Big grin Okay! And she cheerfully takes it over to the bin and throws it out.

This happened twice more, all with as happy a result. Somehow I had more in mind to teach her if she does not clean up she'll lose her toys, not if she doesn't clean up she gets to throw things in the bin. Not the effect I was going for

The Sims

The little girl's been playing The Sims on her iPad since a few months after she turned 2, and is still at it several months later. I was a bit dubious about introducing her to it, but I'm pretty sure now I chose well. I picked the Sims because it's just a dollhouse game, and well, she has a dollhouse, so why not? There's no danger or skills required or violence or anything really out her understanding. And it's turned out to be helpful in some ways.

For starters, her ability to interact with the UI is as good as anyone's. There's an in-game task of catching ghosts where she has to tap on a randomly moving ghost. She gets it pretty often.

When she first started playing she'd sometimes start hunting for ghosts in our house. It was cute. She'd walks around with a stick or some kind, pointing in random directions, saying I'm hunting ghosts. Occasionally I'd hold up a toy or something and say It's a ghost! quick! tap it and she'd tap it with her finger repeatedly until she declared Yey! I got it

Anyway, back on topic. You can make the people in the game do things like eat, go the loo, etc. We've instilled in her that the people must must must wash their hands after going to the loo. If one of them walks away before washing their hands we make a very big deal of it oh no! He's got to wash his hands. Get him back. To the point that not only will we occasionally hear her yell at the box no! Wash your hands!, but she's usually very clear that she needs to wash her hands after using the loo.

Same thing with pets. When a person plays with a dog or cat I tell her they need to wash their hands. If the girl touches me after touching an animal, I'm allergic enough it will really do me in. So having a place for her to practice it is helpful.

She did point out recently that they have toothbrushes on their sinks, and was very confused when I told her she couldn't make them brush their teeth.

The sims can be dressed in many outfits. I advise her on what outfits work and what looks terrible. More a case of me instilling my tastes on her, I know. But at least we talk about what she likes vs what I like. And in a place where the people wearing those clothes won't be offended by our fashion policing.

I do have to turn the sound off whenever she plays. The music is a little grating after a while, but the main reason is the sims speak a made up language that sounds like English. This I found, to my horror, was interfering with her learning to talk. When she started playing she was only just starting to beat words into sentences. When I found her randomly peppering her speech with sim-words, I immediately went into the settings and turned off taking forever. As complaints against the game goes, it's pretty minor, considering the designers didn't have the impact on learning to speak in mind when they added the fake words.

We do get into arguments about some things. She has to go to work. No she doesn't. No really the game said it was time. No. She has to take a bath now! This never ends well. You see, the game has quests and other things you need to do to keep the fake little people alive and happy. But the girl can't read so she thinks all these things I say we need to do after there's a popup are just my whimsey.

She also likes to buy things using the in-game money ("simoleons"). Sometimes I'd be saving up to buy some rather expensive things like a cat or house. You see, after she goes to sleep, I set the sims on the tasks of making simoleons or "life points". Which takes a while, but it means we can do more fun things when she next plays the game. But, not infrequently, she'll, when my back is turned for a few seconds, spend some huge amount it took me weeks to acquire. Often on something meaningless like a chair.

That leads to arguments.

Sometimes L has to intervene and take the game away from both of us. Until we can show we can play nicely together.

I think these cases are more learning points for me. Get me used to how she treats limited resources and how to convince her to use them wisely. Or at least to understand what is a frivolous purchase and what would actually make her happy to have.

We're not there yet

All in all, the game seems to be doing her some good. Kind of like an interactive What Do People Do all Day but without the anthropomorphisation. I'd recommend it if you have a non-fragile device you feel safe leaving your kid alone with.

Eating out

Very odd experience eating out tonight. We ate out at a restaurant tonight, and the girl behaved exquisitely. It was the best she'd behaved at a restaurant in essentially two years. Last time she did this she wasn't walking yet or eating solid food, and was spent the whole time attached to one of us in a sling.

We sat down, and she patiently put up with L and I talking adult things (business, childcare, etc) while she did a little bit of drawing. She happily ate all of her appetiser while we waited like 20 minutes for the mains to come out. Every moment I got more and more nervous she'd break down and run away. But she just sat there, occasionally asking for more water or help with the pen. When the mains finally arrived, she ate it. With a fork. A real full-sized fork. Admittedly she needed help with about 40% of the meal, and the first half of the meal I had to blow on the stuff to cool it down enough (surprisingly hot for a children's meal). But she sat there patiently thought the entire meal. Only when we left the place and were safely in the tube station on the way home did I turn to her and tell her proud of her I was for behaving so well. I felt if I even alluded to it in passing, even to L when the girl wasn't looking, I'd ruin it and she'd cause a ruckus.

I'm still a bit shocked. I have two theories as to how this happened. The first one is that we went to a museum beforehand to see Club to Catwalk at the V&A before it closed down. The girl enjoyed running about the place, climbing stairs, watching the video installations, and (outside the exhibit) pointing out the bottoms and crotches on all the statues. It's one of the very few times we've had an opportunity to get her a bit of activity in after her nap and before dinner. If this is what happens when she gets some exercise after her nap, I am damn well going to find some way to get her some bloody exercise before dinner more regularly. Even if that is my most exhausted and useless time of the day.

My other theory is more pessimistic. Every time she starts behaving well for me she gets a fever 3 or 4 days later. The only time I ever got her to fall asleep while reading to her (what I thought was a great triumph at the time) turns out to be just before she came down with a cold. Likewise the time I thought she finally got the rules of walking on city streets in her head and started to hold my hand when we were walking together, she again got sick a few days later. Dashing my hopes we'd won the behaviour battle. I really hope an incoming illness was not the cause of the good behaviour at dinner and that it was something that can be cured with a decent application of running around.

I've seen the future

One possible future. A future in which having a family doesn't mean giving up a career.

L and I recently met with a client. We have friends that work at the site, and a couple of them were willing to look after the girl while we did a demo session on our software. After we were done, we picked up the girl, had lunch and got on with the day.

This got me thinking, what if it were always like this?

Imagine childcare being ubiquitous and available on demand. You work from home and need to visit a client? Bring the child with and drop her off at the on-site day care. You need someone to look after your little ones while you're at work? Bring them in with you, leave them in day care and visit them during lunch and breaks. Spend your coffee break with your kid and your coworkers' kids in a little play and chat session.

Imagine if daycare spots weren't precious, closely-guarded resources only available to a select few at a great cost. But if they were cheap and plentiful enough you could just take advantage of it like a cloakroom. (Obviously not treating the children like coats, but the comfort you feel when you hand over a coat knowing full well it will be well looked after and safe and happy when you come back for it). Your child would be around when you were able to look after her and, when you need help, it's there for as short or long periods as you need. It's just there, easy and reliable.

I'm not going to even try to conceive of how this world could come about, let alone how the mechanics would work. It's just now I can picture what childcare in an enlightened world could look like.

And I'm jealous.

Now we are drawing

So the other day I decided to draw with the girl. She surprised me by suddenly being able to write letters. I drew a simple shape on paper and handed her the pencil. She drew an A. Then a B, then a C. And so on, with prompting, up to N. Barring some mishaps with N and J and K, they were all surprisingly recognisable. The later half of the alphabet wasn't as good. She managed reasonable attempts at O, P and Q without trouble, but the rest were mostly squiggles.

She's been tracing out letters on her blocks. I think that's been helping her on this. She has a set of tiles with a letter on one side and a picture on the other. For the past few days she's been playing with them in a new way. She'll say A is fooooooor, while tracing out the letter. Then she turns it over and says Apple. Repeat for all 20ish tiles she can find at the time.

The sad man

Three days ago she started drawing people. Recognisable as such, too. On a long bus ride home on Thursday she was was drawing people in the condensation on the window. After we got home I gave her some paper to draw on. She spent a few moments drawing and handed me sheet saying she drew a sad man. And it clearly is a sad man. At this point she'll draw better than me in a year (admittedly, I'm terrible).

Yesterday she was all about drawing faces. She's got all the parts in the right place, though she sometimes has trouble with positioning noses. We started with drawing letters and numbers, but she turned almost everything she drew into face.

Things she says, part 1

Adventures in what happens when a new person starts to be able to make their thoughts known to the people around them.

Here's some highlights of things she's said to me, offered without (much) further comment...

Going to high tea?

No. We're not going to high tea now.

Going to high coffee?

What are you doing?

I'm making cous cous.

Ha ha ha ha. Funny.

No. Really. Cous cous is a real thing.

Let me see this goose goose.

About a month and half ago we were on the tube. At one stop the doors opened and she saw a poster on the wall advertising a book. Suddenly she says I see her. I see her! I watch her on the Daily Show!

It took me few moments to realise the ad was for I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai who we saw on the Daily Show couple of weeks previously. Clearly she's taking in far more than I expected.

Careful, the water might be to hot for you. Your skin's a bit delicate.

I am not delicate, I am a little girl. Little girls are not delicate. Little girls are LITTLE GIRLS.

I found poo in the bed.

What!?

Pooh. I found Pooh in the bed. He's here.

to wife From now on we're only ever calling him Pooh Bear.

What should we do with your leftover pasta? Should we save it?

No.

What should we do with it?

Feed it to monkeys

...

It makes sense

I found that

where did you find that?

In your pocket.

jokingly, to me Stop it! Bad Monkey!

indignant You're not a bad monkey! You're a good good good good good good good good man.

holds up a big sea shell
do you know what this is?

Yes

What is it?

uuuuuuuh. A hedgehog

What says "meow"?

A cat!

What else says "meow"?

Three cats!

If you eat all your grapes on time, I will go out and buy you some lychees.

And come back?

While watching a montage in a move where the heroes are learning new skills
Do you want to learn to play piano?

I do.

Do you want to learn to fence?

I DO!

Don't do that. It's dangerous.

She continues doing it

Wait... Do you know what dangerous means?

Yes

what does it mean?

I'm doing something

Language

This first batch of posts after my long hiatus are generally going to be all about changes to the girl that have happened in the past few months. There's a lot of them. It's impressive how fast these things come in. She just changes suddenly and it's just now a part of who she is. Then she changes again. Layer upon layer, turning into a person.

At 2½ she talks quite clearly now. She even occasionally uses such elaborate tenses as I would like to have... or multi syllable words like I'm frustrated or interesting turns of phrases I don't care for stones (said when eating lychees). On the other hand she still doesn't entirely understand how to structure sentences – she'll surround the subject with verbs rather just inverting the subject and verb: What is that is?

The best way I can try to illustrate how she's developed in just the past few months in how she refers to pictures of herself. We have a screensaver that loops through randomly all the photos we've ever taken of her. When we watch it with her, we'd point to her and say That's you.
Needless to say, when she started talking, and even up until this summer, she'd point to a picture of herself and say That's you!

I tried explaining it to her how it works, but it's really hard. No, I say that's you, because it's you. But you have to say that's me. I kept telling her that for ages. It didn't sink in.

About a month ago got through her head that saying That's you was somehow wrong, so she started using her own name instead. Dropping the pronoun entirely: That's [name]!

Just a few days ago, she pointed and said That's me!, which she's been saying ever since.

One thing that's really cute is how she pauses to think of the right word to say. She'll be talking, then stop and look up and slightly to the left or right, maybe saying aaah then she'll look back at you, say the word and continue.

Reading to her has gotten interesting since she's quite good at remembering the text. For a number of the simpler stories, all I have to do is turn the pages and she'll recite the right part of the story to me. She misses some words here or there, and does her own interpretation of the meaning sometimes. There's one book which she got for her birthday which she would recite one page as Sometimes good. Sometimes bad... Last week she picked it up again and included the full text, rather than just the meaning: Sometimes you're good. Sometimes you're bad... It's like she always knew the words, it's just that then she decided that the "you're" was significant.

The girl is doing surprisingly well on her long path towards reading. She starting to kind of get the idea that the letter a word starts with is important, but she's not quite sure how. Fortunately we have some games to work with, like this set of cards with a picture the name of the thing spelled out. Like a picture of an umbrella that says "umbrella" underneath.

If left to my own devices, I would most likely get too tempted to start with the annoying parts of English, S is for 'see', C is for 'cue', Y is for you, D is for 'Double you', A is for 'are', E is for 'eye' and so on.

But instead, we've found a practical way to try to teach her about letters. So she can now recognise upper case letters and has got her head around most lower case ones as well – "l" and "i", "u" and "n", "d" and "a" are the trickiest. A couple of days ago I convinced her "ll" was two els instead of an H with a hard-to-see bar. So now when she sees "ll" instead of double-el or el-el she says els.

She also had lots of trouble with going through the letters of "cat". She kept saying c-d-t.

That's not a D, it's a lowercase A. They look similar, but the line on top of the A is much smaller.

c-d-t.

It's an A sweetie.

c-d-a-t.

Close enough.

We have more work ahead of us.

I like you, two

So far I'm really loving two years old. She's really turned into a proper little person. The big notable change beyond her ability to speak us now she has an imagination. I love the fact i can converse with her. It makes things so much easier now that she can tell me what she needs or wants. But mostly, it's the things she comes up with... concepts so off the wall, or strangely logical or shockingly wise for her age. It's just a delight to see what she comes up with next.

She can now remember and sing songs, or at least sing her interpretation of what she thought she heard days or weeks after hearing them. She doesn't always get the words right. Actually the times she gets the words wrong and makes up the replacements is what amuses me most (maybe more on that later).

This fall she went though a phase of asking us to Sing about x. Just picking some subject or person she knows about and asking us to sing about it. Sing about mamma, Sing about dinner, Sing about three. The weirdest one was Sing about doubt...

I don't think i can do that.
I don't think this will work.
This song won't be good enough
and I'll feel like a jerk.

I have to concede making up songs off the top of my head really kept me on my toes.

Shortly after her birthday she started making up names for her toys. So for the first time it wasn't just L and I naming toys for her. She has four rubber ducks. The big one is Mamma Duck. The blue one is Butterfly Duck. The one dressed as a pirate is Pirate Duck. And the small plain yellow one is Swings and Park.

Now she makes up names for her toys and various unnamed characters in books all. Most are sensible: Charlotte (sometimes Scarlet) the doll, Basil the dragon, Bartholomew the wraith. Some are weird, like Poad, Saddy, Floop and Queen Bee – people in a video game.

There's a bit of damage to the bathroom door from where we had to pry it from the wall to free her finger. She saw it a few months ago, pointed to it and called it dragon teeth. I have no idea where she got that from. But it does kind of look like it could be. This was the first time she came up with something so completely out of nowhere, I was very surprised when she said it.

One favourite of mine is her interpretation of the title of the book Don't Wake the Bear, Hare. She's not come across the word "hare" before, and she knows the book is about a rabbit, so she calls it Bunny, Don't Wake the Bear Here.

In retrospect I also really liked 6 months. That was realty the last time we could sling her up and take get with us and she'd stay quiet and calm the whole time. We could still go to diners and pubs without trouble and she'd yet to get us kicked out of anywhere.