A Fishdragon's Ramblings

"Jimmy! Jimmy! I can't SEE. What's happening?"
"Andy ... you don't want to know."
"Tell me! I hear ... wetness."
"It's horrible. Tell my mamma I loved her."

I still have time to book a room in the block (barely), but have not done so. I prefer to split a room, possibly as many as 3 or 4 ways (I get at least half a bed). Does anyone have room-space they'd be willing to rent me, or should I get a room and seek sharers?

Also, anyone from Chicago-wards want to share in? I won't have the kid with me, and will have a car. Or maybe I can go in your car if you have space for a person, a suitcase, and a guitar. :->

Anyone going southwards from Chicago Friday with room in the car for a congenial singer willing to entertain (or take driving turns)? Feel free to pass this around if you know someone not on LJ who might be interested.

It's been a long time since I actually posted a developmental update. And this isn't one, or at least not an exhaustive one.

Quickie breadcrumbs: She's currently the 'right' size for the high end of 4T clothes or the low end of 5T, with most 6T being 'wearably oversized'. So mostly I'm buying 6T/kid-small, to give her a running start. Some t-shirt necks are still too small for her 23" HEEEEID, so keyhole necks are awesome. Her shoes are mostly size 9 ... I say mostly because for a while now she's been fitting shoes by width not length, with 1/5-1/3 of the shoe empty in front of her toes. This is now changing, since she's STILL in 9s, but the empty space up front is gradually disappearing.

Also she got what I think were her first serious growing pains; mid-upper thigh, both legs, deep in the leg, bad enough she was sobbing uncontrollably; we ibuprofen'ed her and applied cognitive distraction until the Good Meds took effect.

But that's not really what I want to talk about.

Yesterday at my favorite thrift, I got a whole bunch of 6T sundresses, summer tops, and skirts-with-shorts-inside (a favorite garment-style for her, always chosen first out of the drawers). I also grabbed some books. They had a wad of Junie B. Jones'es we hadn't read yet, which Beka loves for 'long story' at bedtime.

They also had a Maisy compendium including four titles we'd not had before. As Maisy is a big favorite around here, I also snagged it.

Last night at bedtime, Daddy refused to read her the Maisy book and she picked something else.

Today at naptime, she read me two of the stories. Herself.

Now, I helped a little, but when I say 'a little' I mean I:

1. Pointed at the next word to help her keep her place


2. Pronounced all unfamiliar proper nouns, like the names of Maisy's friends Tallulah and Eddie


3. Pronounced the hardest syllable of any really long words to give her a running start (like saying that through is "an ooo word").

That's what I did. That's ALL I did. And she made it through two Maisy books she'd never been read before, without needing help on over 80% of the content in them.

Reader, I was amazed.

It wasn't fast and fluent yet, with pauses between each word as she decoded the next, but she WAS genuinely reading through them, parsing the syllabic stuff on the second occurrence of words that were unfamiliar the first time, and genuinely GETTING IT.

Then she grabbed a Junie B. Jones book and made it most of the way through the first paragraph, with increasing helps frequency, before getting frustrated. Junie B. Jones, apparently, "is harder than Maisy".

I have such an excite I don't even know how to handle it. :-> Now to bone up on nwe-to-her books of approximately the same reading level as Maisy to toss her at for more practice!

Thanks to Daniel the Tiger, my child decided suddenly she just plain had to make a storybook.

So we did.

All text is precisely as she specified it (along with her titles on the cover page); all drawings are hers. I did the paper cutouts to her request and specification. Shared largely without editorial comment; I'll transcribe the text below each image in case it's hard to make out. A couple of explanatory notes at the end.

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So it turns out I can go. :-> Anyone got half a bed I can give them money for?

Well, 4 years and a bit over 1 week. But precision is fun. This is for posterity, after all. :->

So I know I've been saying a lot (in person, if not here) that she keeps making quantum leaps in verbosity and ability to stick with a concept and logic at it, but wow did she just make another one.

Today when she came into the house after the school-and-commute, she began talking about her day. And (with occasional clarification/prompting questions from me) she continued talking about her day and what happened for about 20 straight minutes.

This has never happened before, even with us badgering her about it. Narrative! Narrative recountings of her day! So awesome.

There have been photos taken, but they're not edited and posted yet, so they'll go up in their own post.

Well, Herself turns 4 a week from tomorrow, and indeed there's been leaps and bounds occurring in the past month or so. In early January she suddenly passed (yet another) quantum mark in verbalness, becoming ever more willing and able to narrate a stream of ideas/thoughts/occurrences.

Then a week ago, out of the blue, she did this:
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Representational art, that an outside observer can identify (probably) without needing to be told by her what they're looking at. That's a baby, by the way.

And on Thursday, her dad came in the door with her from their commute home in the evening. She was running on and on in a narrative stream, and he looked at me over her head and said, "Forty-five minutes of this." So yet another quantum of narrative/descriptive/verbal ability has been passed.

At bedtime, she seems to be following the plot of the long stories (currently a stream of Oz books, two chapters at a time), which is also relatively new. She'll react to plot happenings and ask questions, which she never used to.

Definitely growing up, I tell you what. Maybe by WisCon she'll be less melty-down in the afternoons/evenings, and everyone will have more fun at the con. :->

Edited to add: Oh, and she's recognizing more words on sight (though not reading fluently yet, or sounding-out-and-understanding). Her name, in all forms, she can recognize and type accurately. Her handwriting's a little rougher but she practices. And the other day in the car, she looked out the window and said, "That building says Open!" and it did. So did the one next to it. :->

... in a palpable sense, I should clarify.

My cousins are engaged in clearing out my grandmother's house of personal items so the estate sale can happen next Saturday (if you're Chicago-local and interested, it's at 9621 S Keeler in Oak Lawn, 9AM-5PM on Jan 12), and taking posession of all the photos and family-history-related items that nobody else called dibs on.

There are several bound journals with entries in them written by my great-grandmother (who I knew and baked cookies with; she died in 1992). I want to transcribe them -- apparently I am the only one of my cousinage who can make heads or tails of her handwriting! Years of practice on birthday and Christmas cards, I suppose. I may post 'good bits version' excerpts here; on the whole they appear fairly quotidian to my cursory flip-through.

I have also taken posession of a shoebox-like-amount of fairly big reels of 8MM home movies, and a projector for showing same -- any advice from the peanut gallery is welcome, if any of you have had to deal with archiving, viewing, or otherwise interacting with same. If it can be determined which of them have anything of interest on them, a collection might be taken in the family for digitization costs, I suppose. Of higher-quality digitization than me projecting them on a wall and aiming a video camera at them, which is about what I'm up to in-house. :->

Also magically turned up from the belly of some lost deep file-drawer are my mother's genealogical work on that side of the family, from 1975-79. Should be fun to go through sometime when I have time and energy to think about the tree, and see what of it I have since duplicated -- and what in there might be new to me.

I apparently didn't even do one of these lists for 2011. I knew I was being bad about it, but THAT bad? I had no clue. The 'year-end' tag at the bottom will bring you to my other whole-year roundup posts.

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1. Jan 1: Night Work, by Laurie R. King [Kate Martinelli series]
   
2. One Salt Sea, by Seanan McGuire [October Daye #5]
   
3. Jan 5: The War of the Flowers, by Tad Williams
   Loved this. Would recommend whole-heartedly to anyone into fae-and-our-modern-world books (like the Toby Daye ones, or Patricia Briggs' ones, or ...).
   
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