Waiting for Hari

A bit of a late posting

February 27, 2007

Julia plays in the bath tub with what must be thousands of little figures and some stacking cups. The tiny dinosaurs fight or dance or talk to one another. Beauty and her Beast join in the dancing and one or the other of them slips into the water and needs rescuing. The fishy bath toys swim and talk, sometimes get strung together and usually serve double duty as squirters. Sometimes the floor gets very wet and most of the time Julia gets clean, her hair gets washed, and the toys get put away in her big green bucket.

We have been doing 15 minute swimming lessons at our JCC. Julia is not very willing to work with her teacher, Sally, but she is learning to paddle and kick. Like Cheshire, Julia is very willing to take direction and tries whatever her teacher or I tell her to do. She likes to swim. When she has a noodle tied around her, she can move pretty quickly and she loves to chase and be chased. I hope that we are close to a good pool anywhere we end up this summer.

School is moving along. I don’t think that Julia really gets any ESL training as part of her short school day but her understanding and use of language in school is improving. I watched one day as her teacher called out from across the room that Julia should not put a pencil in a doll house. Without missing a beat, Julia took the pencil out and put it away. She does not bring home the quantity of art work and work papers that most kindergarteners do, but last week she was very proud that she pasted cherios in two big circles on her "O" page. In the last week, Julia has shown a bit of separation anxiety when I leave her off at school. When I walk her to the classroom she will stand at the door and watch me walk back down the hall, calling out to me a few times to turn around and wave and throw kisses. Does she now realize that I go somewhere else when she is in school? She is always very happy to see me when I pick her up, and picking her up at 2 gives us some time to do something – swimming, kids museum, or visiting – or to go home and cuddle on the couch and watch a movie.

Julia has been watching some of the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese film maker. The films are whimsical and not Disney-fied. The world is still very pretty but not flashy. There is magic and lots of flying things, some fighting as well, and good endings. She has two favorites right now – Porco Roso and Tortoro. The first about Italian air pirates between the wars and the second about a family settling into a new house and getting to know the local deities.

This afternoon, Julia went into the refrig and was rummaging around making a lot of noise. I called out to her and she shut the door quickly and came into the living room looking guilty. She was chewing a giant wad of something and was unable to answer when I asked her what it was. So much was in her mouth that she could not really close it completely and I could see that she has prunes in her mouth. I asked her how many she had taken and she held up four fingers. So, yes, prunes are a favorite treat but much more importantly, she answered with a number. This is a first. Yeah, numbers!

Julia is using more and more sentences that she makes up. They are short and to the point and usually missing some words but she uses her sentences instead of single words. At times, she stutters when she speaks. As a stutterer, I am probably over-sensitive to her speech and worry more than any fluent person. We do nothing to stop her from speaking and let her take all the time she needs to get words out. She doesn’t do it all the time and although I think that she elongates her syllables when she is using new words, words she cannot quite pronounce, or when she is tired. I do hope it works itself out of her, but if not, we’ll investigate therapy before she gets too set in her way. She did not elongate sounds in Chinese.

We have moved from play dough to modeling clay. It is harder to work with but the colors don't blend as easily into that brown muck that she usually manages to makes, and Julia seems to like the texture of the real clay better than play dough. The way she rolls and kneads the clay, shape it into odd characters or very believable dinosaurs suggests experience that we know she does not have. It is as if the clay awakens something much more mature in her hands. Sooner or later we will begin firing some pieces if we can.

Julia used the word magic this morning. She was playing with her bubbles (which she is not supposed to do outside the bathroom) in my room. After blowing one she said, "Look, it magic." Her second, non-physical word – the first was idea.

Oh my girl!

posted by Suz @ 4:43 AM