She calls it "The Hat" and she would, if she were allowed to, carry it with her everywhere. She identifies deeply with the fish, who is the source of adult authority in the story, and she constantly asks the name of the male protagonist. (We don't know. He is never named. He's the narrator, and he never identifies himself. We've decided that his name is Ted).
Margaret thought that they should both be Madeline, but it was proving difficult to assemble the requisite costume in Ellie sizes, so we have opted for Ellie's literary idol. I ordered a hat. I have many skills, and probably, in extreme cases, I could make a Cat in the Hat hat, but it would probably cost 20 or 30 dollars by the end, for equipment, and screwing up, and refinishing the table after I let hot glue dribble on it. But there was a lovely one for sale on amazon, and amazon delivers things right to the door, and I don't have to brave Michael's 2 days before Halloween, which is, just between you, me, and the internet, the sort of thing that Dante, were he writing today, would have made one of the deeper circles of Hell.
So I ordered a hat. And it came yesterday. When I opened it up, Ellie gleefully shouted "The Hat the hat! The Hat the hat." It was very cute. And she grabbed it, stuck it on her head, and trotted off to find her copy of The Cat in the Hat.
She's very dedicated, is our Ellie. And she reads with you. It is endlessly amusing to ask her what the fish says, to get her to say "No, no!"
Margaret is also fond of hats in all their various iterations, and so once Ellie had been haled off to bed (and more Cat in the Hat reading, because that is what she does before bed every night, if not being fobbed off with Roar Book, known in most circles as Where the Wild Things Are) she tried it on.
But she was too busy watching White Christmas (her choice -- she likes the dresses and dancing and thinks that she and Ellie have a lucrative career ahead of them singing about being sisters) to look at the camera.
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