Chatting With Ellie

One of the great pleasures of computer technologies for the past three years for us has been video conferencing through Skype. Our granddaughter, Ellie, lives 1000 miles away, and we’ve been lucky to visit her at least once a year there, and she’s visited us twice in three years. But we’ve also been able to visit her almost weekly via video conferencing.

For the first year, it was mostly just us watching her sit in her chair or on her mother’s lap, with her occasionally acknowledging some visual movement or color or sound, though mostly just bobbing around and squirming. But over the past couple of years, she’s acquired speech, she recognizes us by name, we sing with her (“Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Twinkle Twinkle,” “ABC,” and the like (I’m looking forward soon to teaching her “Born To Run”)), and read along with her.

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Of course, it would be so much better to live just down the street or around the corner, as we did with our grandparents. But that not being an option when there isn’t a home not to go home to, these technological visits are a poor but welcomed and pleasurable substitute.

Top photo: 5 months, intrigued with grandpa waving with his bandaged hand (surgery).

Bottom photo: 38 months, in one of her princess dresses (Jasmine), reading with her mother, applying lip-balm.

3-year-old's Curiosity

Mommy: "You have to hold an adult's hand when you cross the street."
Ellie: "Mommy, what's a dolt?"

Thanksgiving

We’re in DC for our fourth annual Thanksgiving week with my stepdaughter, son-in-law, and (most important) granddaughter, Ellie, now just three years old. And the most thankful thing we have each year is watching Ellie grow from an infant to a toddler to now a little girl with attitude who we can talk with (if not always coherently) and who certainly likes to talk to us (“I don’t have any panties on! Look at my butt!”, a boast we suspect she got from her mother). Yesterday afternoon she came to stay overnight with us at our hotel, going to the park to play on the slide and swings, then to the swimming pool for a foot or two into the water, though more fun playing choo-choo around the edge of the pool, then across the street from the hotel to TGI Friday’s for dinner (and My Giant Sticker Activity Book), and finally back to the hotel to find Ellie’s “hidden bed” (the fold-out couch in our suite) and a couple of hours of jumping and playing on it. Grandpa Mac had to succumb to sleep before Ellie.

I never desired to be a parent for a variety of complex reasons. And I wasn’t a very good stepfather when I was thrust into that role (willingly). And I’ve always had a reputation of not being particularly tolerant of young children in most all public places. So what explains my infatuation with Ellie? From her birth (and we visited her two days after) I’ve been sucked into her being. I care about her to an extent I wouldn’t have imagined any time in the past. Is it because I have a love of her mother (my stepdaughter) that I didn’t realize, transposed to Ellie? Or because a love of my wife (her grandmother), transposed? Or perhaps simply an innate attraction to a very precious child? (As we were leaving the restaurant last night, I overheard a woman remark to someone at her table how cute Ellie was, and when I returned to the hotel this afternoon the maid, just finishing up the room, said she’d seen Ellie this morning and found her adorable.)

Of course, the reason for my love of Ellie doesn’t matter. It’s what it is. And I’m just enjoying it. My whole adult life has revolved around analysis – issue analysis, literary analysis. But in the end there are just some things that can’t be analyzed. Like playing choo-choo around the edge of a swimming pool.

Ellie's Non Sequiturs

Our granddaughter is making progress in her communication, though there are still bumps in the road of comprehension:

Daddy: "I feel like crud."

Ellie: "I feel like strawberries!"

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Daddy: "Ellie, do you want to take the dogs for a walk?"

Ellie: "No, I have to flush the toilet."

Though it’s always possible that I’m the one still having comprehension problems. . . .