Team Lank

"O say, can you see?..."

"...O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!"

As always, Alice watches eagle-eyed and then demands in on the action. Here she climbed the podium, stared at me intently, and kept singing a loud "Da da!" until I'd repeat "The Star Spangled Banner" for her--over and over.

***

Edith may have medalled in the holly-branch fencing competition as an individual, but for the most part it is teamwork these days, at home and at school. Edith and Alice are having ever more fun with each other, as Alice comprehends most of what is said to her now and is making her own wishes very clear. The girls seem to complement each other well: Alice is generally patient and resourceful, able to cope with being turned away from a special art project or prized book of Edith's and find something of her own to do nearby when prohibited from big-girl activities. In general, however, Edith is exceptionally generous with her things and her time, and we don't have much squabbling. Alice dotes on Edith but also loves to ham it up herself, and the two excel at making each other laugh. And Tom and I admittedly enjoy having a new ally in our corner when Edith loses her still-short temper over some triviality and Alice mocks her. "Aagggh!!!" screams Edith angrily over a piece of bread dropped on the floor. Alice stares at her, then perfectly matches the "Aagggh!!!" Tom and I smile down our sleeves. For her part, Edith joins us in head-shaking when Alice appears ready to hurl herself off the bed or climb over the back of her high chair.


Yet despite her incessant one-year-old mobility, Alice already appears poised to follow her sister in an avid love of reading. Her first request most mornings, repeated throughout the day, is "Buh! Buh!" as she heads for her bookshelf to find one of her favorites. (She now has strong enough preferences that I just added a sidebar library list to the blog for her.) Her daily reports from daycare also often say that she requested to be read many books. Book in hand, she settles into our laps and pages through sequentially, asking us to name unfamiliar objects or pointing to favorite objects and naming them herself (as she did throughout the Ash Wednesday service with the book I brought in an effort to keep her quiet. "Alice sure knows her words!" said more than one member of the congregation.)


Transferring literary knowledge to life the other morning, Alice approached a sleepy Bismarck, planted herself in front of his nose, and cheered, "Do[g], go!" In general, she appears to be a more instinctive animal lover than Edith, keying in on Bismarck, wanting to feed him treats, and expressing concern in the mornings that he get to go outside.

Edith's love of animals tends toward the plush variety, for whom she plans and builds elaborate homes, towns, and kingdoms--shades of her Uncle Peter. Today we operated a bird hospital for her toy seagull, Fly-Out-For-Fish Seagull (nickname: Fly-Out -for-Fish), and his three babies. She continues to have a boundless imagination for pretend play but even more often these days is enthusiastic about conducting projects. She wants to build a fort and have a pretend battle like the children in Roxaboxen, or she envisions a bridge from her dresser to her bed, or we're trying to create perfume. As always, she insists on others' participation in these activities, which can be an endurance test for those of us with less imagination or enthusiasm for the task at hand. Oh, how we look forward to the day when Alice is up to cutting and stapling together cardboard skyscrapers or mixing smelly potions!

In the meantime, Edith does have enthusiastic participants in her classmates. One of the joys of recent months has been seeing how close she and the seven other kids in her pre-K class have become. It's such a pleasure to hear her talk about them with intimate knowledge and appreciation of who they are and of the fun they've had together. She runs into school in the morning eager to see them and often isn't ready to leave in the afternoon. This past week she faulted us once for arriving fifteen minutes earlier than usual, cutting short her play time. Another day when we arrived, Mr. Allan was calling out the names of kids who would take the first bathroom run of the morning. The four named kids got into a huddle, piled up their hands, and chanted, "What's gonna work? TEAMWORK!" and then ran off to the bathroom. Okay, I'm not sure what team potty use looks like and maybe don't want to know. But the general sentiment was great.

We enjoy the other kids in her class ourselves and have fun in the afternoons looking with Edith and Adam in detail at the underwater village they created together at the sand table or admiring the clown make-up she and Ruth applied to each other. The school's philosophy of letting children's interests guide both the daily activities and the curriculum seems to work especially well with the pre-K kids, who seem so comfortable and at home in the free-flow space for which they have assigned weekly responsibilities but in which they also enjoy a fair amount of freedom.

Edith's class has been deep into a study of ocean life for some time now, and most days our trips home are punctuated by lessons in the eating habits of baleen whales or the function of echolocation. Her newfound interest in science is a delight to her non-scientific parents. In addition to sea life, she and I had a great conversation the other day after she asked, "How can I lift my book if gravity is pulling everything down?" So we have been talking gravity for several days now--and with it, mass, density, and force. This evening she was getting a heavy bottle of apple juice out of the refrigerator, and as she heaved it onto the counter she was saying,

"Oof! You've got a lot of mass, apple juice! I know it feels like the apple juice is giving me a hard time, but really it's the gravity pulling on the apple juice. But I'm just saying, 'No, gravity, my muscles can pull harder on this apple juice in the opposite direction to lift it.' But they can't pull hard enough in the opposite direction on the house."

Other recent Edithisms that we've enjoyed, as she adopts a new set of verbal quirks and mannerisms:

"My, but Torrey upsets me! He almost always has his shoelaces untied. When we go on walks at school, Ms. Neelam knows that I am bothered because I almost always walk right behind Torrey, and I have to keep my eyes on the sidewalk the whole time to make sure I don't step on his laces and trip him. It frustrates me."

and

"Will illusion be on television tonight?"

Illusion?, I ask.

"Yeah, illusion. You know, where they lie on their backs on the sleds and go shooting down the track?"

Our lives these days may feel like the luge, hurtling us around blind curves on the edge of our runners, only barely hanging on. But Tom and I feel blessed every day to be on a team with these kids.