All By Myself

Ellie is growing up.

You can tell by the way that she is becoming more and more independent and insistent on things being done her way, right now, without any delay, woman, because people are getting slack and shiftless around here and need to be kept in line.

I think she feels that we need constant supervision.

But she doesn't think that she needs supervision at all.  She thinks that she's perfectly competent to do all sorts of things, like put on her socks all by herself.

Or feed herself yogurt.

She's getting so big.  I mean, she's not really competent to do either of the things that she's trying, but that doesn't stop her from demanding that she be able to do them.

The Education of Margaret

Margaret has been going to her preschool for the last few months, and she completely adores it.  She has so much fun, and she talks about it all the time, and when we went to the school picnic, she hugged her teachers with a great deal of gusto.*

There's only one thing that worries me: I think that they're teaching her how to lie.

Because unless happiness for Margaret manifests itself in running around screaming and refusing to continue to do the thing that makes her happy, this is a dirty, dirty lie.

Still, it's a nice drawing of a person in bed.

*I'm pretty sure that you can't have a minimal amount of gusto, but I don't care and I'm leaving the sentence as it is.

Full Employment

The weather is getting warmer, and so we're really pulling out all the stops on the child labor.

They're not very good at it, but they're awfully cheap.

Prongs

In the bath a few weeks ago, when Margaret was at school and so Ellie was enjoying the pleasures of solo bathing, I tried out a new hairstyle.

We decided we liked it, and so adopted it for everyday wear.

Margaret wanted to join the fun, and so took matters into her own hands.

On the bright side, she's all dressed and ready to rob a bank.  So that's good.

Baseball

We've been trying very hard to help Margaret understand her heritage, you know, the one that requires her to be a baseball prodigy, but so far she's been being rather resistant.  I mean, she likes the equipment, and she likes the idea of playing baseball, but so far she's been a bit uncoachable.

For example, she is not pleased with the suggestion that one might play baseball with either a glove, or a bat, but never both at the same time.

We lost that argument.  And she tried, but one of the reasons that people don't play with both a glove and a bat is that it's really hard.

So she went and played hide and go seek instead.

She may be missing a few of the finer points of that game as well.  Oh well.  She'll learn, I suppose.  Or she won't, and that probably won't greatly affect the world.

Latina est gaudium -- et utilis

For those of you who don't have a classical education, that post title means "Latin is fun, and useful."  It is the title for the last section of each chapter in the widely used Latin grammar textbook written by Frederic Wheelock.

Ellie decided to illustrate this for me the other day, holding my Latin book carefully on her lap, and preparing to annotate it in crayon.

See?  Latin is fun.

And useful.

Saturday Mornings

Yes, yes I'm late.

Because this week has been really busy.  Last weekend, I studied like a mad fiend so I could learn all the educational theory that most people learn while getting a degree in education.  And then on Monday, I took a test.  And then I felt like a piece of sodden laundry for the next few days.  And here it is, Friday again, and I'm getting back to the blog.

(Also, for reasons that don't bear going into, I am at school, but none of my students are, so I have hours and hours and hours to blog.  Well, and grade papers.  And perhaps write a final exam or two.  But mostly blog).

Anyway, last weekend, Leo was very helpful in my quest to sit in one place and read books and articles online and rock back and forth muttering streams of words like "Vygotsky, zone of proximal development, Bruner, scaffolding, Piaget, constructivism and four stages, rinse, repeat."  Some husbands would have been worried by this behavior, but Leo studied for the bar exam, and so has a lot of patience for completely weird studying techniques.

He took Margaret and Ellie to the park (in the pouring rain, but still), and he fed and watered and napped them.  And most importantly, he snuggled them.  (All right, maybe not most importantly, but I was rather pointedly not there for the other things, so I don't have a picture.  But I do have one of the snuggling.

Well, two of the snuggling.  Ellie also likes spending quality time with Daddy's phone.