Ella and reading

I feel so privileged to have such a front-seat row to the phenomenon of Ella's learning to read.

She's right there, perched on the edge, right at the cusp of it being easy.

It's still an effort, for the most part, but five things are characterizing this new stage:

1) She knows a LOT more words by sight. Sometimes I can't tell if she knows them by sight or knows them from context; regardless, she's reading a lot faster.

2) She is sounding out words much more quickly, sometimes, as with easy ones, so quickly that it does not cause a pause in her reading; words like "mud."

3) She is starting naturally to read signs when we're out and about. They are visible to her as words rather than as symbols.

4) When there is something to be read, she often (though not usually) stops me when I start reading it for her, and says, "No, I want to read it!" For our now-7-year-old friend Dario last year, that was the hallmark of his reading -- once he had it even a little, he wanted to do it. Ella has always, since she was a baby, had the philosophy, "Well, if someone else can do it for me, why not? Comfort is important, after all." She had that attitude about hiking, too, but even that is starting to change.

5) Ella is becoming willing, even eager, to hear chapter books without pictures read aloud. She has explained to me in the past that she can't see the pictures in her head for chapter books; in this way, she is very different from Madison at the same age. But now that we're listening to a lot of books-on-CD in the car, she's even happier to hear books than music. She loves hearing snippets of the Harry Potter books that Madison is reading (she's in the middle of book 5), and Ella loves the Harry Potter movies. We're listening to Emlyn's Moon right now, a tale set in Wales.

At one-month-before-6 with Madison, we had made our way through my reading all 19 of the original Boxcar Children series, and Madison was very motivated to learn to read them on her own. She was very skeptical that she could do it, but right at this age, she started to try it and that was it, she was off to the races and has never "needed" us to read to her since. I think Ella will be chronologically a little behind Madison, but not too far. She likes the Boxcars, but she's in no way obsessed with them as Madison was.

A New Timeline

We started a new timeline last week: Western Culture, 1450-2001. It's 11 feet long, as opposed to the 115-foot long timeline we were able to have snaking through the basement of our last house. But that one had to cover 4.6 billion years of earth's history, this one just needs to cover 550 years.

The girls absolutely love the timeline, and I think it will help with the Birthday of the Day, too. Last week, we colored in 2-cm-wide strips at the top of the timeline to represent the main intellectual/historical movements: Reformation, Renaissance, Elizabethan Era, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Computer Age. We put the main American wars on there, too.

Early this morning, I started finding images of great people...past Birthdays of the Day, plus people I just thought should be on there. I have the next 14 days of B of the D too, so they can paste them on sometime during the relevant mornings. We had a terrific time doing about 10 of them this morning. We only have every 50 years marked off on the calendar, and Ella can't get her mind around estimating where, say, 1867 is on the timeline. Madison is fine, though, but I still think I might do a light bar marking every 10 years.

I'll be working on this Word document gradually, because it does take time to find the images and resize them and put the names and dates on, but anyone is welcome to the document once I have a lot of people on, if you want to do your own timeline. It will be a real handy shortcut.

I wish I could find my camera, this would make a good picture to post!

Sorry I've been absent

I've been extremely busy. I've started a computer class at RIT on Mondays and Wednesdays from 4-6. It's an advanced web database programming class, and it's hard and I'm mostly lost but still hanging on by my fingertips. Actually, the "hard" stuff isn't what's hard for me -- it's the not-knowing-how-to-log-into-the-RIT-system and do the common things that students have been doing for years by this time, like creating directories and using their special text editors and stuff like that. So it leaves me trying not to whisper to the 20-year-old next to me to say, "OK, how do you log on to this thing?" and trying to figure out whether the "create folder" is the old DOS command "md" (for "make directory"...it's not, turns out it's mkdir...these are the things that are stymieing me).

But other than the RIT system fussing, it's going relatively smoothly, even with juggling the girls' schedule.

And up until late last week, so was the rest of life.

"You know, we're really settling in here," said David on Friday morning. "Life is finally calm, and good. We're happy."

The words were still hanging in the air. like in a balloon attached to his mouth, like in a cartoon.

And then at 10:30 I got a call from my dear friend Patrick, whom I dated in college and with whom I'm still very close. He's a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I see him every few years when I have a reason to be in Cleveland. A bit over 5 years ago, he was in a horrible accident and in a coma for many days. He still has lingering physical problems from that. The call from his girlfriend in October 2001, when no one knew if he'd live or die, really sucked.

This time, the call was from Patrick, and it really sucked, too.

"I've got colon cancer," he said.

He's 37, damn it.

He sent me an email with a jpg of his colon. Amazing what the technology can do these days. I like this kind of stuff, so does he. It would be absolutely fascinating if only that thing blocking about 1/3 of his colon weren't freaking inside him.

He meets with the oncologist tomorrow, Monday. They're going to resection (i.e., take out) a big chunk of his colon very soon, then they'll know whether it's spread, what stage it's at, etc. And what are his chances.

My MD friend William sent me some statistics. If it's only Stage 2 cancer then he has a 2/3 shot at living more than 5 years. Apparently, that's really good statistics for cancer in general. On the other hand, if you're interested in, say, living more than 5 years, then it pretty much sucks. A 33% chance of NOT being alive in 5 years. Fuck.

It's a damned good thing there is no Master Puppeteer or I'd be one angry, angry person right now.

Dr. Seuss's birthday, March 2

It's Dr. Seuss's birthday. And there's nothing more fun for a parent than to hear the 7-year-old who is missing her two front teeth reading Fockth In Thockth to her younger thithter as her out-loud reading for the day.