Journal Entry 7

Thursday, September 24, 1987

We haven't gotten dressed yet. We haven't eaten breakfast, even. But Camille is here, and the three girls are already playing.

This is what play looks like this morning: Leotards. Ballet shoes. The Nut-cracker Suite on the record player. Girls dancing with lovely curving arms, graceful-awkward leaps and turns, gently solemn faces.

They dance like this, with quiet, serious intensity, for a good long while, but eventually the girls submit to hair brushing and gobble up their breakfasts. Lindsey changes her clothes, because Delia and Kiki are coming to take her to Mommy and Me again.

Since Delia is running late, I read a book called The Get-Along Gang to the three girls. Then we get out some felt-tipped markers and paper and start to draw. When Delia arrives, Lindsey happily says good-bye and runs out the door, eager to see Kiki again.

Mindy and Camille say, “We're ready for school!” They inform me that the day's letter is “L,” and they busy themselves with their cubbies and pencils and paper. “Use the chalkboard,” Mindy directs me.

I write a large “L” on the board, and the girls copy it. So easy! They look as solemn as they play school as they did dancing ballet, so I decide to try for some smiles as I begin a guessing game. “Can you figure out what L-word I am drawing?” I begin to draw a lion – and before I even get to the mane (the most lion-y thing about a lion), Camille has guessed it. I write “lion” on the board as I congratulate her.

The girls are smiling now—but they put their serious scholastic faces on as they copy the word “lion” from the board. I'm thinking I'm going to do Round 2 of the guessing game, but they are now drawing on their papers. Mindy copies my lion face and then, she tells me, writes “lion” in “handwriting.” She means cursive writing, but she doesn't know how to do it, so she just makes some enormous loopy squiggles that she says means “lion.”

Camille draws a human figure and then does “cursive” in small, rounded script. She reads her message to me (which is lucky since it, too, is made up of squiggles). It's a pretty long sentence, and I don't catch it entirely—something about a woman from Mars doing strange things. (No connection to a lion, as far as I can tell.) I offer to print her sentence below her handwriting, but she says, “No. I'll read it to people.”

I'm figuring we are done with the letter “L,” but the kids ask for another guessing game L-word. I draw a lemon, and Mindy guesses. Again, both girls copy the word “lemon.” Actually, Mindy draws the lemon first, and then starts in on the word. She soon runs out of room and complains to me. I tell her about hyphens, and she ends up with:

Le-

mo-

n

Drawings and labels done, the girls ask me for “one more.” I draw lips, thinking maybe the kids will say “mouth,” but they chime in with “lips” right away. This time they don't bother to write and print and draw. I can see that they're done as they start fussing with their cubbies again, putting away their pencils and erasers.

I'm thinking the girls are going to run off and play, but Mindy remembers the wooden dinosaur skeleton model I'd said we could put together today. We open the package. All the “bones” are made of flat pieces of wood. The girls are excited and start sorting the bones. They make a pile of rib bones—I tell them the label “rib bones,” and they eagerly use the term—and then they figure out which bones belong in the neck and which in the tail.

Mindy sniffs one of the bones. “It doesn't smell like other dinosaur bones,” she tells me, “because they smell bloody.”

“These are just wooden pretend bones,” I say. “And they're a lot smaller than the real bones.”

Mindy nods.

The model bones are hard to put together, and I can see that I am going to have to sand some of the “bones” for the thing to work. I go off to the garage for some sandpaper, and I am soon busy sanding rough connections.

Mindy and Camille troop off and come back with two rather large books from our bookshelves. They are regular adult books, but the girls tell me that they are their “school books,” and they pretend that they are getting them out of their cubbies (even though the cubbies are a lot smaller than the books). They settle down in their chairs again, and each starts to turn the pages of her book.

“These school books are about dinosaurs,” Camille says. As she turns the pages, she starts to talk a little about dinosaurs, as if she were reading interesting bits to me. But soon she is distracted by the pictures of foxes, crows, and other modern animals, and she loses the dinosaur stuff in favor of narrating the mammals and birds in front of her.

When Camille is done “reading” to me, I ask Mindy about her book. “Is it about dinosaurs?” I ask.

Mindy has the book Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, so she answers, “This is my space book.” Then, as she turns the pages, she says, “Here is Jupiter...The moon...This is the sun...Wow! Space is beautiful!”

Camille agrees. We chat a bit about space, and Mindy says something she'd already mentioned—that she thinks our next subject, after dinosaurs, should be space. I ask Camille what she thinks of the idea, and she agrees again.

The kids are being awfully agreeable today!

The girls ask for time on the computer. They decide to play “Reader Rabbit” with the sorter game, choosing the letter “L.” (Yep, they are still holding onto their chosen letter-of-the-day!) Their game play is really improving, and after each girl has done three games, they seem ready to move on. Before I can suggest a change, Mindy says that she wants to play one more game and then switch to another computer game. She plays, does well, and turns the mouse over to Camille. Camille plays her last game—and has a perfect round! Reader Rabbit appears on the screen and dances in reward.

“I want to make it dance, too,” Mindy decides. So she plays “one more” and ALSO gets a perfect score, and a dance. Big, happy smiles!

The next game they choose is a picture match-up. I assume they will play separately, as they had the sorter game, but although they take turns with the keyboard and mouse, they work together the entire game, and they robustly cheer for themselves, too.

Halfway through the last game, Mindy mentions that she is hungry for snack. I ask if they want to take a break from the game, but she says she will wait for “snack time.”

Snack time, she had previously informed me, is 10:30.

At 10:30, the girls abandon the computer and move back to the wooden-bone-strewn table for their snack. I help them get out bagels, cream cheese, “Quacker Crackers,” and apple juice. They need a little help with the bagels, but they do the spreading and the pouring, and the eating and then the cleaning.

I sand wooden dinosaur bones!

Next, the girls inform me, it's time for recess. They start in with some dance moves again, with a few gymnastics stunts thrown in for good measure. After practicing more leaps, they ask for music. I put Grieg's “Peer Gynt: Morning” on the turntable and begin to dance with them.

“Let's line up,” Camille says, arranging us in the hallway. Then she leads us out of the hallway in a line. I continue to happily dance with them until Mindy says, “Mom, when can you leave? We need private time.”

Oh, well!

I go back to the mess of bones and sand paper and wood dust and begin to clean up. (Obviously, we aren't going to complete the model today!) I can see that the girls are now doing partner dances, each with a large stuffed animal as her partner. Eventually, I spot some wonderful action: as they dance, they throw their partners into the air and then catch them again!

The girls invite me back to recess to read a book to them. (Hmmm...read-aloud time during recess? It's pretty obvious these girls have never been to “real” school.) They choose a book called Messy, by Barbara Bottner, and the story includes a ballet class and dance recital. Camille assigns herself to be various characters in the book, as I read, and Mindy wants to be the main character, the star dancer who is (you guessed it!) messy.

Lindsey usually leaps and cavorts and capers and dances as I read aloud, but with her gone, I'm thinking we are going to have a more relaxing reading session, because Camille and Mindy are usually curl-up-with-the-adult cuddlers. But not today—during this special recess read-aloud, they are in constant motion.

When the book is finished, Mindy gets out the bell and rings it. “Recess is over,” she announces.

I offer to read a dinosaur book in Spanish to them. With the pictures as context, the kids do a great job of translating a lot of the Spanish. But they can't seem to hear what I can see: the similarities of scientific words such as “herbivore” and “herbivoro.”

While we are still enjoying studying the pictures and translating the Spanish words, Delia, Kiki, and Lindsey arrive back home. Camille and Mindy are ready to share some of their dancing with the younger kids. They beg me to put on the dance recital videotape, so I do. Delia and I watch as all the kids dance along. Soon the kids segue into another, related activity: they remove all the sofa cushions and pillows and arrange them on the floor. It's a lumpy, piecemeal gymnastics “mat,” and they do somersaults and gymnastics poses. “Remember to point your toes,” Camille reminds her cousin.

Delia eventually breaks up the dance/gymnastics party, saying that she and Kiki have to leave. And I say, “Let's make lunch.”

We'd already decided to make some special “pretty” food for lunch today, and Mindy had chosen a cucumber/carrot snack she'd seen in a magazine. Which is very surprising, since she hates cucumbers! But the veggies look like flowers, which Mindy loves, and she'd figured out a substitute.... I cut the carrots into “stems” and curling “leaves,” and each girl arranges one on her plate. Round slices of cucumber make Camille's and Lindsey's flower heads, and Camille removes the seeds from her flower center. Mindy gets a round of apple instead of cucumber—and of course I cut the core and seeds out. Although Camille likes her hole-flower-center, with the plate showing through, Mindy doesn't. I suggest a dollop of peanut butter as the center, and she enthusiastically endorses the idea.

To go with the food flowers, there's yogurt, cream cheese on bagels (again), tuna, apple juice, and a pear to share.

After lunch, energized by the addition of Lindsey to the group, the girls want to do more dancing, more gymnastics, more dance recital video, and (Mindy only) more Reader Rabbit on the computer. After seeing her big sister take a break from dancing to play on the computer, Lindsey decides she wants to play on the computer, too, so she does a quickie color-in activity. (I have to help her control the mouse.)

Soon all three girls are on the dance “stage” again. When I check in on their activity, I realize that this time, it's not just dancing. The girls are doing full-on pretend play, with characters and story lines.

I get a lot done in the afternoon!

Finally the girls are tired of playing. Camille asks me to read Messy, again, and the others choose two more books. After a very pleasant reading session, I ask the girls to help me clean up before Roz and Ginnie come for piano play. All the cushions and pillows, the stuffed animals and books, some other assorted toys and markers are restored to their rightful places. I glance at the clock. Hmm, we have some time to kill—but that means time to make another mess. “Let's do chalk on the driveway!” I suggest.

Today the girls draw pictures (rather than write words). Camille draws several vehicles and some stick figures. Mindy draws houses and people. Lindsey draws faces—lots and lots of smiling and grinning faces.

After that, it's Roz-and-Ginnie time, and piano time, and Maria-picking-up-Camille time. Over and out.

Journal Entry 5

Thursday,
September 17

Camille arrives this morning seeming very droopy. I realize that she (1) has to get up earlier than my girls, and (2) has to get dressed / brushed / ready / and out of the house early, too.

Luckily, she soon cheers up when I offer to read to all three girls. We sit down and read Who Sank the Boat? and The Puppet Theater Fairy Tales.

The girls begin to play, as they often do, with dolls. This time it's Cabbage Patch dolls, because Camille has brought hers over to play with the others' dolls. The three girls carefully dress Caroline, Carrie, and Baby Lynette.

Suddenly the fully clothed dolls are left on the floor, unplayed with—and the girls are busy dressing themselves. Actually, they aren't “dressing” so much as “dressing-up”: wrapping themselves with long swaths of cloth of all colors and patterns.

“We are children from other lands,” Camille tells me, arranging her drapery artistically.

“Oh! Cool! What other lands?” I ask.

She looks blank and turns to the others, who just keep on winding more cloth around and around.

“Mmm...” I say. “Camille, you look like you're Thai. From Thailand?” I suggest.

She turns back to me with a serious face. “Yes, that's what I am,” she solemnly agrees.

“Where do you think I'm from?” Mindy asks.

“Gee...you look Indian, from India.”

“Yes, that's what I am,” she says with a huge smile. I realize that she has reused Camille's exact words. We are beginning to sound like one of those kids' books that uses repetition like verse.

I turn to Lindsey, who is wearing bright woven fabrics: “Gee...you look South American,” I tell her. (I don't know why I went all continental on that one. Just because she's young and wouldn't know Peru?)

“Yes, that's what I am,” she says, instinctively playing along with the repetition motif.

The girls move away from me and interact with each other, three strangers from three different lands. I start unloading dishes, then move to sort some laundry. The latter task puts me near their play, and I realize that the girls have created some elaborate plot in which somebodies' fathers are dying.

I don't know what that's all about.

That reminds me that Mindy has suddenly been “into” males. She told me last night, “When men are in the house, I like to follow them around and be with them, more than I like women.”

This was startling to me, and I asked the natural question: “Men? What men?”

Mindy looked up at me. “Daddy and Grandpa, of course!”

Yeah. Of course. What other men could there be?

Remembering that conversation with a smile, I take a load of laundry out to the garage. When I get back into the house, Mindy asks me to comb her hair in a “fancy Indian style.”

G-ulp. I'm not that good with hair. And I have no idea what a fancy Indian hairstyle would look like!

Still, I try my best, and Mindy seems completely satisfied with the half-up style with pinned-up-swirls. Naturally, I instantly get two more hairstyling “clients.” Funnily enough, Camille and Lindsey don't ask for “fancy Thai” and “fancy South American” styles (which, honestly, is a very good thing for my lack of hair knowledge)—they want just what Mindy has. I battle with a knot in Lindsey's hair, with bobby pins and hair clips, and with covered elastic bands—but eventually I triumph over hair and hair apparatus and am looking at three “fancy” coiffures.

Mindy reminds me of a cartoon she doesn't watch but that she catches glimpses of as we tune in the next show, Muppet Babies. Mindy says, “Remember that show, Mom? The horse in that show is MAGNIFICENT!” I can hear the capital letters in her voice. Mindy goes on: “I'm going to dress this horse just like him!”

She gets out one of her toy horses with long lavender hair. I notice that, although her play with hairstyling and lavender horses usually assumes that the horses are female, this time she's using “he” and “him.” Very interesting.

The other girls get out horses, too, and all three begin to comb and adorn horse tails and manes. Mindy holds up her finished product, saying, “Oh, do you look MAGNIFICENT!” Then she turns to another horse who is still languishing in the toy box.

Camille suggests, “Let's sing that Mr. Rogers' song 'I Like to Tame My Time,' okay?”

Another TV show we don't watch. Mindy doesn't know the song but agrees to sing it and struggles to follow along.

—Oops! I guess she does know the song a little (from somewhere), because she is now leading!

After the song is over, Camille proclaims, “I want my horse to look magnificent... beautiful... cute... magnificent!”

All I can think of is how magnificently beautiful (and cute) these girls are.

***

When a substantial number of their toy horses are styled, the kids lose interest. I help them pose their Cabbage Patch dolls and fancy-haired horses and then clean up the combs and clips mess. As soon as we're done with all that, Mindy makes a break for the dinosaur “activity books” I had laid out on a table, ready for the moment when the kids wonder “what now?”

Soon all three are coloring dinosaurs. Camille chooses a crayon carefully—lemon yellow—but then takes the time to ask if that particular dinosaur was, in fact, yellow.















So we have a rather long conversation about dinosaur colors. I get out some of the books we've been reading, and the kids talk about the colors that the illustrators used. We talk about the fossilized remains of dinosaurs that scientists use to learn about them. “Even the few times we have a print made from where the skin pressed into mud,” I say, “that doesn't tell us the color of the skin, does it? Like a footprint in sand is the color of the sand, not the foot.” The girls “get” that, and conclude that we have no way of knowing what color the various dinosaurs were.

We discuss how illustrators and toy makers decide on dinosaur colors, and I say something about some modern reptiles having coloration that helps them blend in with their surroundings, so they can hide. “Like green lizards and snakes that are camouflaged among plants,” I explain.

Camille, looking at an illustration of bold purple-and-orange dinosaurs, innocently asks, “Were plants purple and orange back in dinosaur times?”

So then I talk a bit about plant pigments that absorb the sunlight that plants need to make food, and how some of these pigments are red or purple, but most are green. I casually use the word chlorophyll when talking about the green pigments, and it doesn't faze the kids a bit, but who knows how much of all of this they will actually absorb?

In the meantime, the girls have some pretty brightly colored dinos emerging from their pages—including Camille's lemon-yellow dinosaur!

Mindy has moved on to doing a dot-to-dot picture. She asks me what comes after 9 (surely she knows already!?), and I calmly say ten while pointing to the number 10. “And after that comes eleven,” I say, pointing to the number 11. “What do you think comes after 11?” Mindy easily draws to the 12-dot and is merrily on her way—but then pauses again to ask me what comes after 19. “Two-O, which is the number twenty. Then 21.” She easily deals with 21 through 29 and then pauses to ask— —you guessed it!— “What comes after 29?” I explain, still patient, but I'd love it if she figured it out on her own!

As they color and dot-to-dot and help dinosaurs find their way through mazes, the girls sing songs from “Free to Be You and Me.”

“Let's play Dino Lotto,” Mindy suggests. All three girls find it easy to find matching dinosaurs (and other prehistoric creatures), but Lindsey starts to get a little upset when Camille and Mindy fill up their lotto cards before she can hers. I distract her with a toy she really likes right now, a pegboard.

“Now some books,” Camille suggests. We read two books about dinosaurs and then a library book called Tell Me a Trudy. Lindsey plays with the pegboard while we read, but when I finish the Trudy book, she announces that she is hungry.

I make a quick, nutritious snack for my two girls and finally coax Camille into eating breakfast. While they eat, I put away the library books, dino lotto game, and dinosaur activity books. What dinosaur-related item should I put out next? I consult a list I had brainstormed into existence a while ago, see a measuring activity, and think, “Good plan.”

I go out to the garage and find the metal measuring tape. I put it, a ball of yarn, and the sidewalk chalk onto a table, and Mindy's interest is instantly roused. “What's that?”

“A measuring tape and some yarn and the chalk,” I answer.

“Yeah, but what's it for?”

“Well, after you guys finish eating, and we clean up, you'll see.”

Lickety split, I soon had 3 filled bellies, a cleaned-up table, and the girls' attention.

“What's that stuff for?” Camille repeated.

“Well, remember we keep talking about how huge and long the dinosaurs were?” I ask the girls.

“Yeah!”

“Well, we keep reading that scientists think supersaurus was about 100 feet long, but I was wondering if we know how long that really is? So I thought we'd find out. And that means going outside, out front.”

Enthusiasm greets this suggestion, and we go out to the sidewalk. I make a mark near the corner and stand right on that mark, and I direct the kids to each take a piece of chalk and walk away from me in a straight line. When they think they've gone 100 feet, they should make a mark on the sidewalk and then write their name by their estimation. (I explain that estimation means guess.)

The girls walk and walk and keep turning back to look at me. Finally each of them stops and makes her mark.

“Are you going to guess, Mommy?” Lindsey asks.

So I walk to a spot—carefully NOT counting out paces, because I just want to see what my intuition tells me is the right length—and I mark a line and my name on the sidewalk.

“Now let's check our estimates,” I say.

We use the measuring tape to mark the yarn every ten feet (I have to run into the house to get masking tape and a Sharpie pen), and then we carefully use our jumbo yarn-tape-measure to mark 100 feet.

It turns out, we were all pretty far off—our guesses were all way too long!

Once we marked the 100-foot length, I consulted some notes I'd made and did some more quickie measurements and marks on the sidewalk. Then I take the kids on a “Dinosaur Walk.” As we walk along the sidewalk together, I say, “This is the supersaur's head. Here is its neck...keep walking...keep walking! Okay, now we're to the body...still the body. And here is the tail...more tail...and still more tail!”

The kids love it! They run inside to get some dolls, then they take turns leading their dolls on the same dino tour, sticking pretty close to the words I'd used even though their proportions are a little bit different. They clearly get the main idea that sauropods had loooooooong necks and loooooooong tails.

As we walk back to the house, the girls see a telephone pole and pretend it is a looong sauropod neck. They crane their necks to look up at the “dinosaur's head.”

Suddenly this changes into a game of “I Spy,” which we play for several turns. Mindy and Lindsey seem most intent on noticing little natural items that will stump the rest of us, and Camille seems intent on making it a word game. The game starts off with a rhyme, “I spy with my little eye...” before getting into the guessing-game part: “something green!” But she keeps up the rhyming, the sillier the better. “A green machine? A green...a green thing? A green bean? Oh! A green queen!”

* * *

Home again, the older two girls decide to sew. They get out some fabric and their school scissors. I decide I had better supervise and bring some laundry over to fold while I keep my eye on things.

Mindy says that she is going to sew “a dress for Caroline and overalls for my little bear.” Camille states that she will make a costume for Baby Lynette. (Carrie, Camille's Cabbage Patch doll, is languishing nearby, no doubt waiting for someone to offer to sew something for her!)

Lindsey shows no interest in cutting fabric and sewing. Instead, she has grabbed the plastic fold-up ruler that came with a toy tool bench and is “measuring” everything.

The girls talk about measuring, and Camille asks to borrow the ruler. She then measures Caroline and Carrie. She passes the ruler over to Mindy, who also measures and compares the two dolls.

“They are the same!” Camille states correctly. “That means they are born on the same day,” she concludes...not so correctly.

I open my mouth to challenge her logic, but Mindy is answering, so I shut my mouth again and wait to see what she says.

“I guess so....:” Mindy starts. “When was Carrie's birthday, Camille?”

Camille says that her doll's birthday was in May.

“Well, mine's is in June,” Mindy starts to reply. “Wait!—Mom, when is Caroline's birthday?”

Cabbage Patch dolls arrive with a name and a birthday already printed on the adoption papers, so there is one “right” answer, and I provide it: “November 1.”

Camille says, “Oh, Carrie's is December 1.”

I'm confused as to Carrie's birthday being in May AND December. But I shrug off all concerns about logic because I'm so pleased that Lindsey has started to help me match socks and fold laundry. With her help, I quickly finish the load.

Lindsey gets some dolls to play with. I take the laundry into the bedrooms and put it away, then hurry back to supervise the sewing project.

I chuckle when I hear Camille lecture her doll, “Carrie, you're only five—you don't know much—I haven't taught you. Wait until you're six!”

Even funnier, a few minutes later, is Camille spouting off about her doll's desire to have more than one costume for Halloween. “It's frustrating!” Camille complains to us. She turns back to her doll, saying, “Carrie, please, would you stop all this nonsense?”

* * *

I have to run a few errands, so we all get ready to go out. We go to the copy shop and then stop by the grocery store to buy a few needed items. I tell each girl that she can choose one piece of fruit to buy and eat.

Camille asks, “Can I choose fruit juice?” She holds up one of those special individual-serving all-natural fruit juices, and I say sure. Possibly a mistake, because Mindy and Lindsey immediately decide they want juice, too.

Sigh. Less fiber, more sugar (fructose), and probably fewer vitamins. Oh, well.

I give each girl money so she can buy her own juice, and then I pay for my larger order. As we go out to the car, Mindy asks if she can keep the ticket.

“Ticket?” I ask.

“This ticket,” she says.

“Oh, the receipt,” I answer.

“What's a receipt?” Lindsey asks.

“Those little bits of paper are called receipts,” I explain. “And they show that we paid for the things we bought. They're sort of like proof.” I turn to Mindy. “Yes, you can keep your receipt if you want.”

When we get home, the girls drink their juice and rinse the bottles. Then the two older girls resume their “sewing projects,” which now involve draping and knotting, plus some large-scale stitching with needle and thread.

Lindsey has found the T-rex model and is trying to talk to Camille through it. Camille doesn't answer. After several attempts, Camille finally responds: “I won't talk to you, because you're bad.”

We discuss the word bad in relation to behavior, and I ask if meat eaters doing what they have to do, to stay alive, are really being bad. Lindsey defends T-rex, saying that he can't help what he is. (I notice that, in this world of mostly-females, T-rex is a “he.”)

In the meantime, Lindsey is looking around for something non-upsetting to feed T-rex. “What can we feed him, Mom?” she asks.

Picture: A tyrannosaur considering behaving badly?

“Steak?” I suggest.

“Yeah!” Mindy and Lindsey both say.

Camille seems okay with a meat-eater eating steak, too. (Maybe I should've challenged the logic on this one, saying something like “Steak from a cute little cow,” but I go the easy route and let them distance meat words from animal words. I'm really being practical here—I don't want to risk Camille upsetting her parents by becoming a vegetarian at age 5, plus I don't want Camille to upset Lindsey, who is getting a bit tired at this time of the day, by continuing to call her chosen plaything “bad.”)

Picture of T-Rex, by Mindy 9-1987. The T-Rex seems to be ignoring the child and going for the tree!

Now all three girls seem to think the tyrannosaur is a good guy. The older girls are using scraps of fabric to clothe him, which involves getting out the ruler again and measuring him. Soon Lindsey informs us that he is ill. They make a call to the dino doctor to find out what to do.

Camille has rummaged through the dinosaur model box and discovered the two-headed dragon (we just don't have enough dragon models for their own box!). She has the dragon tell Mindy to go get more meat. “We're running out of meat!” she says.

It turns out that Camille's dragon is sick, too. More phone calls.

Lindsey feels that a green pillow would comfort T-rex, and we all help her use scrap fabric to make one. As he lays down on the finished product, Lindsey says, “He has mucus. He's going to die!”

The other two girls make sympathetic comments...

What with the scissors and the needles, I had to be right in the thick of the threesome a lot today, and it has given me a chance to notice how much Lindsey adds to the richness of play. When I am not so near their play, it sometimes seems that she is mostly a disruption to the older girls' pretend scenarios, because I hear more from the girls when there are problems than when there is collaboration.

The girls make a move to go outside to play. I insist on them helping to clean up the scraps of fabric, and then they race outdoors. I finish up putting away scissors, needle and thread and then sit down with my notebook to write all of this stuff down.

I don't know what they're playing outside, but I hear through the screen door the word “protoceratops.” A few minutes later, the girls go through the house and into the garage, calling back to me, “We need hammers.”

“What? Why?”

I am picturing actual tools and a whole new level of supervision, but Mindy emerges from the garage with three croquet mallets. She begins to answer my question. “We need them to dig out the fossils we found.”

Camille explains, “You and Jim are paleontologists, and we are your children.”

Mindy goes on, “And we found a bed of fossils.”

The kids have scrounged a plastic container from somewhere and return to the back yard. I see that they are hammering at the dirt with their croquet mallets, and then collecting pieces of rock in the container.

“Look at all these fossils, Mom!” Lindsey says through the screen door.

Mindy is so excited by two of her finds, she comes in to show me. “Look, Mom, dinosaur teeth!”

I ask, “Is the dinosaur a meat eater or a plant eater?”

Mindy holds up one of the rocks, which is rather round, and says, “Plant eater.” Then she holds up the other rock, which is sharp, and adds, “And a meat eater.”

A few minutes later, Maria arrives, and the girls get to tell her about the sewing projects and the sick dinosaur and dragon and the bed of fossils. Another day summarized in a few excited bursts...

But it's hard to truly explain all the rich complexity that is a day!

Journal Entry 4

Tuesday, September 25, 1987

Today I put my foot down and have all three kids sit down, at the table, for breakfast. Unfortunately, Camille pouts a bit (it's so much harder to know how to respond when it isn't your own kid, too!). However, even she eats a little bit.

All three help me clear off the table when they are done. We all troop to the bedrooms so that my girls can get dressed, and I see that Mindy has a surprise for me: she made her bed! Yeah!

While I do the dishes, I encourage the kids to play. Mindy makes a Colorform picture (I notice that she names the shapes correctly as she uses them), Camille listens to a tape on Talk'n'Play, and Lindsey pages through several different dinosaur books (making quite knowledgeable comments).

Lindsey asks if it is her turn with the Colorforms yet, but Mindy says, “No, I want to copy my picture.” She gets out crayons and a piece of paper and begins to copy each shape.

Lindsey says, “I want to sit down and watch you, okay, Mindy?”

Mindy's fine with it, and I feel great. The peace here is wonderful! I think that Camille's presence sometimes causes my two to behave better.

(Except when it doesn't.)

Lindsey is now doing Colorforms on one half of the board while Mindy copies her picture, which consists of a house, snowman, sun, snow, and grass. Lindsey goes for abstract art, with a picture that is randomly arranged shapes and colors. (Actually, it's pretty cool!)

The kids discover the masking-tape number line I had laid out on the floor near the piano. I suppose it is the proximity to the piano that inspires this, but Mindy starts to use it exactly as I had planned to use it, singing “Little Bird” by numbers as she steps on each number. We all join in.

After we're done with “Little Bird,” we sing-and-step to “Thumbkin” and then “Mr. Froggie.”

Camille asks if she can measure herself. She carefully lies down along the number line, her heels at 1 and her head at... Her head is between two numbers, so I discuss the concept of "half" in a measurement. Of course, Lindsey and Mindy want to measure themselves, too. We round everyone's height to the nearest half.

Next we decide to do standing broad jumps. As each girl jumps, I play the interval jumped on the piano (1 to 4, 1 to 5, 1 to 6), and of course the girls compare their jumps, using words like longer and longest and best. I'm ready to defend Lindsey as shorter and younger, if the girls get competitive, but each is more interested in figuring out her own best jump, instead.

I make up a song about their ages, using the tune of “Thumbkin,” and we sing and step and hop and play the piano:

“How old's Camille? How old's Camille?
She is five! She is five!
She is such a big girl! She is such a big girl!
Run, Camille, run! Run, Camille, run”

And so forth...

Finally done with the number line and the piano, I can hardly wait to see what's next. Mindy goes right back to copying her Colorforms picture. Lindsey gets out paper and crayons, too, and starts drawing; she is not copying her Colorforms abstract piece. Camille uses the Colorforms, too, this time. She arranges shapes while saying stuff like, “There are three balls. Guess which one is Mickey Mouse?”

Adventure

The girls are finally well enough to walk to the park. We take our plastic toy dinosaurs, some foil, and a camera with us. At the park, the girls use the wet sand to build volcanoes and swamps. They pick up leaves and twigs and plant these around lakes lined with foil (to hold water), and then they pose the dinosaurs in a scene, chatting about what to do and how to do it.

There are two other children at the park. Mindy says, “Make sure the other kids don't let the dinosaurs eat each other.”



Indeed, there seems to be no bloodshed at all in their play. Camille hides her dinosaurs from Tyrannosaurus Rex; no carnivorous eating allowed. The dinosaurs barely even growl and roar (although there is a little of that). Mostly, they just talk to each other.

Now the three girls have run off from their dino-land and are playing on the swings and slide. They are, of course, pretending to be some sort of characters—I can tell that they are changing identity every once in a while—but then they drop all of that as Mindy shows the others “a new trick.” Everyone happily copies the new trick.

Then Camille shows THREE new tricks. The others try to copy her but do not succeed. Camille does things that Mindy can't do (or won't do, from fear?), but Mindy seems a little more determined today and works really hard to travel across the bars. She succeeds with only a little help—she will probably soon be doing it herself.

Once again, I feel so glad that the kids aren't competing with each other. Nobody compares, nobody pokes fun.

I pick up a plastic dinosaur and start making footprints in the wet sand. Mindy notices and comes over to do the same thing with another dinosaur. Camille decides to make her own footprints in the sand.

But wait! She IS a dinosaur!

Soon we're all dinosaurs. The girls decide that we are a family of duckbill dinosaurs. We are peacefully eating when all of a sudden an invisible T-Rex shows up (so to speak). We all whack it with our tails until it leaves. (Strictly self-preservation!)

Home Again

Once we're home, we get cleaned up and then sit down to watch a Disney tape about health and nutrition. When that's done, it's lunchtime. The kids take turns “taking orders” from each other and me, then they carry those orders to the chef (also me) while they set the table. When the food is made, the kids serve the customers and then become customers (me, too!), and we all eat.

With our little outing taking the better part of the morning, and both breakfast and lunch enjoyed at the table, like proper meals, the food situation is working out much better today!

While I do the dishes and put away the food, the girls choose to play outside. Soon Lindsey is back inside and upset. She's being left out. The older girls are mean to her. I sympathize and then coax her into playing a tape on the Talk'n'Play.

I hurry to finish the dishes, but before I get done, Mindy and Camille are back inside, too, Mindy in tears. The girls tell me that they have hit each other with plastic bats!

Yikes.

The lovely peaceful home, gone, just like that.

I suggest to Mindy that she play Kermit's Electronic StoryMaker, and she agrees. Camille takes my suggestion to tape record a message and a song on the piano. Both girls get happy pretty quickly, and soon they trade off activities. When it's Mindy's turn with the recorder, she plays “Little Bird” on the piano, for the recorder, but then also expands on the tune with her own improvisation.

Mindy and Camille go back to the bedrooms to play together. After their altercation outside, I am hoping they play well together this time. I peek in and see that they are combing their little ponies' hair and putting clips into the manes and tails. I decide to try to keep Lindsey busy with me (especially since she is tired and crabby). She agrees to a story, and I pull her into my lap to read to her.

Camille uses her sixth sense, or something, to realize that SOMEBODY IS BEING READ TO—and she comes running in to hear, too.

It seems to me that it is hard for me to do ANYthing with Lindsey without accidentally interesting one of the two older girls, too.

(Oh, well, the next time Lindsey goes to Mommy and Me class with Camille's cousin and aunt, the older girls will get a chance to free play alone without the lure that Mommy is having special time with someone else!)

So we read and read. Fairy tales, The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy, Who Sank the Boat?, When It Rained Cats and Dogs. After a good long reading session, all three girls squeal their way through a game of Raining Cats and Dogs: they gather up all the soft toy cats and dogs they can hold, count to 3 and then throw them into the air. The stuffed animals come pelting down, of course, and the girls gather them up affectionately and come to me saying things like, “Look, I have two dogs and a cat!”

I say, “Where on earth did you find all these animals?”

The girls' answers vary from things like, “It was raining cats and dogs!” to the more practical, “They fell on my head!”

Of course, I'm just using a line from the book, but there really are an awful lot of stuffed cats and dogs in there. I ask the girls to count them, and they do. Twenty-seven.

Good grief, we have 27 stuffed cats and dogs?

We have even more bears and rabbits, and who knows what other sorts of soft-and-cuddly critters? Wow!

The kids proclaim that they are ready for a snack and ask me to read again. This time, I read Jack Prelutsky's Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young. The girls are excited that one of the rhymes is about a dinosaur.


Passport for more Adventure

Mindy has been wanting to play “passport” for a long time. Inspired by the passports given out at the Wild Animal Park (in San Diego), she puts all the stamp pads outside, in a line, and then puts one animal stamp next to each ink pad. Each of the girls has her own passport, and the three travel down the line together, carefully inking each stamp before pressing it onto their passports, and waiting “in line” patiently.

Obviously, at any time one or another of the girls could avoid the line and go to another stamp station, but doing this activity quickly is apparently NOT what it's about. They keep together the entire time.

When Maria comes to pick up Camille, we have another session at the piano to show her all our songs. So ends another day.

Journal Entry 3

Thursday, September 10, 1987

Lindsey and Camille are both still sick. So we have a fairly toned-down, quiet day.

Before Camille arrives, my two sculpt with play dough. As soon as Camille walks in the door, however, she asks me to read some books. We all cuddle together, and I read five picture books. (This would never happen on a normal day, because Lindsey is far too physical, usually, to sit still so long, but it was nice.)

None of the books are about dinosaurs, but when the girls finally get restive with storytime, and go off to answer the question, “What next?” they see the paper, pencils, glitter, glue, and dinosaur stencils I had put on a table. Glitter's a pretty rare thing in their lives, so they are drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet. The girls begin to make sparkly dinosaurs and then branch out to sparkly pictures of everything else in the world.

Yes, this does include a certain number of sparkly fingers, plus the very occasional daub of glitter on a cheek or in the hair. I deal with the latter as quickly as possible with warm, wet washcloths.

After each kid has made several pictures, they seem poised to move off to another activity. But I ask them to help clean up the mess. The bulk of the mess we just toss out with the newspapers that had protected the table. Then I bring out a surprise:

Dinosaur “school boxes”!

These inexpensive cardboard boxes are built along the lines of old-fashioned cigar boxes, and they're decorated with colorful, rather silly dinosaurs wearing clothes. The boxes are identical, but I've labeled them neatly, and the kids carefully put their pencils and glue bottles inside. Then they pore over those funny pictures. Soon the girls have brought the boxes into the realm of their imaginations—Lindsey (they claim) is Debbie Dimetrodon, Camille is Mary Louise Allosaurus, and Mindy is Muffie Parasaurolophus.

Soon these characters are ditched, however, as the girls soon decide to play wedding. (What? Like anthropomorphized dinos can't get married?) Each of the girls takes turns being a bride, and the other two layers are flower girls. After several marriage ceremonies, the play morphs into other sorts of pretend scenarios. I'm busy jotting down these notes as I realize that they are playing something completely different.

“You're Mary Poppins,” Camille says. She goes on to inform me that she is Jane Banks, the girl in the book and movie who has Mary Poppins as her nanny. I wonder which of my girls is playing Michael Banks, but it turns out that Mindy and Lindsey are playing Jane's friends, Emily and Kelly. The Banks family in the books (but not the movie) includes twins, Barbara and John, and two dolls have been chosen to play those parts.

I am wondering if we can get a good room cleaning out of this game, but the girls have something else in mind: they want to watch the movie. I put it on, figuring that at least the sick kids can get some rest—but Mindy and Lindsey sing and dance through most of the movie.

They also go in and out of the kitchen with some frequency, getting small snacks and drinks (just like during “Dumbo” two days ago). They go in and out of the art area, also, getting chalk and chalkboards so they can be like Bert the chimney sweep and draw chalk pictures. Mindy decides to really be like Bert and goes outside to make large chalk drawings on the sidewalk.

I am definitely having a problem with the kids wanting to eat constantly. Normally, with my own kids, I'd probably say, “No, sorry, kitchen's closed,” but I have two problems doing that right now:

1)Camille and Lindsey are sick, and “normal” just doesn't seem to apply.
2)Camille really doesn't eat at established “mealtimes” and “snack times,” so I am afraid I'll starve her if I don't accede to her wishes to eat at other times.

I decide that, when all the kids are well, I will try to lay down the law and have set times for morning snack, lunch, and afternoon snack—then have the kitchen “closed” all other times.

I hope it works.

The movie is over, and the girls go out to see Mindy's pictures. On the way back inside, Lindsey finds a little folded bit of paper just inside the door. She opens it...

“It's a note!” she says.

“It's a note from the elves,” Mindy says with a huge grin.

Earlier that day we had read a book called I Don't Believe in Elves, by Jane Thayer. The elf in the book had left secret notes and surprises for the girl he lived with, trying to convince her that he existed. Although everyone can recognize Mindy's hand in the careful letters and flower picture on the note, we all agree that it must have been left by an elf.

Lindsey and Camille are quite delighted.

I go into the family room, where the girls had been watching the movie, to get the chalkboards and chalk so I can put them away. Then I have a brainstorm—what if I leave a note, too?

I carefully write a message on the chalkboard and sign it, “from the elf.” Then I pick up some cups and napkins and go back into the kitchen. “You guys left the chalkboards out,” I say. “Mindy and Camille, can you bring in the chalkboards? Lindsey, you pick up the chalk, please.”

Mindy is the only one to immediately comply, but she shrieks, “Look! Another note!” and the other two girls go running to see.

“It must have been an elf,” Lindsey says.

They need some help from me to read the note. They seem ecstatic over these secret messages and talk about elves as if they were real--but I am dead certain that all of them, even Lindsey, really knows we're just playing and that I wrote that note.

They know—but they still find it really, really fun.

The rest of the day, all of us continue to write and draw notes, fold them up, and leave them here or there for the others to find. A little routine happens each time we find a new note: each of us says, “I didn't write it!” and after we've all denied authoring the note, one of us says, “It must have been an elf.”

In between notes from elves, the girls bang and plink and plunk our musical instruments, ask me to read more stories, and play with Jeannie, a neighbor who is home from school. During the reading session, I read another wonderful dinosaur book by Aliki (My Visit to the Dinosaurs), plus a book called Do Not Open, by Brinton Turke.

Camille gets picked up early (because she is sick), but the neighbor, Jeannie, is still here. Mindy asks if I can read Do Not Open again.

So I do. This is the story of an old woman and her cat. They find a bottle washed up on the beach. The bottle says, “Do not open.” But the woman opens it, and unleashes an evil genie...Now she and her cat have to trick the genie back into the bottle. It's an exciting book!

Then Mindy asks if they can use the dinosaur stencils again.

“Okay,' I say, “but no glitter this time.” (I'm a pretty nice mom, but I'm not a martyr!) I get out the stencils, and the kids get out their special dinosaur school boxes. While Mindy directs Jeannie to Camille's box and pencil, I bring out the kind of colored pencils that can be blended with water. As the girls begin to show Jeannie how to use the stencils, I get a bowl of water and some paintbrushes. The three girls love experimenting with the new medium. When someone gets a good result, the others immediately try to copy that technique.

Lindsey gets tired of drawing first, and she gets out the play dough again. She starts to make play dough “cookies.” Soon Jeannie and Mindy join in.

When Jeannie goes home, Mindy goes back to drawing with the colored pencils and water. She is really enjoying this!

Then Mindy remembers that she wanted to water the plants out in back.

“But you have to come with me, Mom,” she says.

“Why?” I ask, surprised.

“I'm scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“That scary book Do Not Open.”

Leave it to my daughter to ask me to re-read a book she found frightening! I scoop up Lindsey and follow Mindy out the door, realizing that I am learning as much as they are, every day.